“Got Balls?”

It has been a crazy couple of weeks.

Within hours of Trump taking office, he began signing a series of Executive Orders that directly confront the damaging ideologies and practices that have harmed my son and so many of his peers. At the federal level, our government now acknowledges these truths: Women are real and no one can change sex. Children should not be sterilized because they have uncomfortable feelings. Schools should not secretly transition children against their parents’ wishes.

Within my private RODG parent group, each Executive Order has been met with celebration, caution, and some bittersweet awareness. We wondered, would this really change things in our kid’s schools? What if our kid is at a woke private school? Are medical clinics going to just start lying and coding kids with fake diagnoses of “endocrine disorders?” Would any of this help our kids over age 18 who are already captured by trans ideology?

And fundamentally: would this turn our culture around?

Eight years ago, when Trump was first elected, I joined my fellow horrified Democrats and “pant suit nation” sisters at the Women’s March in St. Paul, Minnesota. We were a large and generally optimistic group of around 100,000. Pussy hats. The future is female! Nasty women! I’m with her! We were specifically unhappy with the sexism that Hillary Clinton faced and her defeat. We were generally concerned about the normalization of Trump’s boorish sexism. Some feared the threats to Roe v. Wade but I confess, I thought that paranoid. At the march I met a woman in her 70s who said she’d been attending these marches for years. “Same shit, different decade,” she laughed. Afterwards, I went home and posted photos of my family at the protest on Facebook. My feed filled up with similar photos from my friends. I must have known 50-70 people there.

Two weeks ago, a friend invited me to join her at the “People’s March”, a 2025 sequel to the 2017 Women’s March. I declined. Photos from the event show a much smaller group. I’d estimate 1,000 to 2,000. Only one friend posted a photo from the march on Facebook – though I don’t trust my feed anyway. What happened between 2017 and 2025? I suspect the decision to rebrand from “Women’s March” to “People’s March” deserves a good part of the blame. Unless we’ve been colonized by Martians, “people” is not a politically meaningful subcategory of people. Not a lot to get fired up about there.

But the deeper reason is this: a good number of women er“people” have realized that the Democrats have betrayed women.

• President Biden betrayed us on the first day of his administration when he signed an Executive Order to allow boys in girls restrooms, locker rooms, and sports.

• The Democrats betrayed us from 2021 to 2023 by not codifying abortion rights when they had full power in DC (as they did in 1993-1995 and 2009-2011).

• Biden betrayed us when he tried to re-interpret Title IX in 2021 to eliminate single-sex sports for girls.

• Biden betrayed women when he hosted Dylan Mulvaney in October 2022 and gave his full support to men like Dylan entering women’s spaces.

• The Democrats betrayed us by failing to vote for the save women’s sports act on January 14, 2025.

So – just FOUR DAYS before the “People’s March,” the Democrats were stabbing women in the back, and they think I want to join their march? I don’t think so.

Now that the Trump Executive Orders have landed, we’ll see how much the culture changes. Gender ideology has done a LOT of damage.

Gender ideology has completely captured my son’s school. We have the Genderbread poster. We have the “Storm” lesson on gender identity. We had the sex ed teaching about "people with a vagina" and "people with a penis" rather than female and male. We have worksheets asking children to label their sexualities and identities. We have pronoun signatures in email. We have secret pronoun forms that ask kids how they want the teachers to refer to them with parents. We have overnight school events, where parents have to actively opt in to “single sex” sleeping rooms, vs. being automatically assigned to “single gender.” We have two teachers who are trans and the children are compelled to use their preferred pronouns. We have boys on the girls’ sports team, and girls on the boys’ sports teams. We have transgender speakers who brag about raising their child without gender.

And not surprisingly, we have 5-10% of the kids who identify as trans or non-binary.

As Helen Joyce points out, the parents who supported their child’s transition will be the last to admit their error. Right before them however, will be the teachers, social workers, school administrators, and counselors who promoted and supported gender ideology. Some of them will claim they were always skeptics and will be able to hide behind a “just following orders” justification. And they were following orders, from the President to the American Association of Psychologists, to the local barista with the she/them button.

But now? What happens? We must change the stories. As long as the Democratic politicians and liberal media continue to promote gender ideology and to have a knee-jerk rejection to whatever Trump and Fox News say, we’re doomed. No one wants to admit they were wrong. We need the big boys and girls of the Democrats in Washington, D.C. and the liberal media to speak up and acknowledge this horrifying error. So, who’s got the balls?