Happy Birthday, Erin Friday

I will never forget the day I met Erin Friday in person. She had reached out via Our Duty for parent support the previous summer using a very funny pseudonym and, unlike most of the parents that find us for support, she came in hot. In addition to wanting to join the support group, she was already deep in strategy for how to defeat the Gender Monster in her area. She listed a series of actions she was planning and then wrote “In other words, I want to convert my sorrow into action. I can no longer watch all of these kids being indoctrinated.”

That Fall, Erin attended our fourth protest at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, held on October 15, 2021, in concert with Joey Brite of Can I Get a Witness. She arrived in a wonky blonde wig, took the megaphone and yelled the loudest. I remember standing there on Sunset Boulevard in my ridiculous disguise to protect my anonymity, thinking that things were going to be different.

She was going to move the needle.

It has been an absolute pleasure to watch her cast off the pseudonym, the wig and any pretense that this is not a hill worth dying on. She is the epitome of what standing up to the bullies looks like, be they Rob Bonta or Gavin Newsom or Scott Wiener or a pushy CPS worker trying to tell her how to parent. It has been a tremendous source of pride to have worked alongside her early on and witnessed firsthand how her multiple interviews opened upwards of 64 million eyes to the horrors of this belief system and how it is a threat to all of us. Everyone affected by this ideology suffers-kids, siblings, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends, teachers, counselors, doctors, nurses…the list goes on and on. The self-censorship, the cancellation, the “be kind” in lieu of truth and justice, the institutional capture.

Erin is fearless, beautiful, funny, smart, and a natural born leader. In the last five years, she has taken Our Duty USA from a humble parent support hub to a well-known organization that gets things done. Yes, we are still helping parents find support, but Erin has a much bigger picture in her mind. A plan. And it is working. It has been a wild sci-fi movie ride. But we can see the light, and we need to keep going towards it. Erin seems to understand how to get us there and, so far, her efforts have put several nails in the coffin of the Gender Monster.

I am unsure if there is a way to fully quantify aforementioned efforts into how many hours of unpaid labor went into Erin’s plan. A single paragraph does not do her efforts justice, but I will try: writing countless speeches, the endless bullet points for hearings, the bills, the articles, the amicus briefs, the testimony, the 2 am television interviews, ordering signs, making t-shirts, hosting fundraisers, hosting a podcast, the thousands of hours of calls/texts/emails with distraught parents, attorneys, representatives, the driving back and forth to Sacramento sometimes multiple times per week; the LISTENING-not to mention keeping her own life together and managing to get her kid out of this bizarro cult. Through it all she has been kind, compassionate and goddamn hilarious. We often laugh about the rumbles of “well funded” that circulate on social media about Our Duty USA and the idea that somehow anyone is making money from the grueling work of suffocating this modern-day pied piper known as Gender Ideology. Yeah, well-funded from our own pockets and the pockets of donors who appreciate the work she does on all of our behalf.

Why am I writing this? Because her birthday is coming up on March 15th. She shares it with Ruth Bader Ginsberg, another trailblazing woman to whom we owe a massive debt of gratitude. If you are reading this, and you have benefitted from Erin’s efforts, consider donating what you can to Our Duty USA. If her words inspired you, or one of the bills she has supported has given you back some peace of mind or some hope, show her some gratitude. She has changed all of our lives for the better, and I am honored and proud to call her a friend and colleague.

Happy Birthday, Erin!