"The combination of radical personal autonomy and anti-religious leftism has birthed a whole new set of counterfeit “freedom from’s” and “freedom to’s” that run rampant in our schools..." Read my final Free to Teach Column!

Jordan Peterson just said what every clinician in America knows but is too cowardly to admit. Peterson: “If there’s a higher suicide rate, the reason is because of the underlying depression and anxiety and not because of the gender dysphoria. And every goddamn clinician knows that too, and they’re too cowardly to come out and say it.” They took the suicide rate and turned it into a hostage negotiation. Looked mothers and fathers in the eye and told them their child would die unless they agreed to irreversible procedures. Peterson: “You’re telling parents that unless they agree to this radical transformation, that their children are going to die. And you think that’s moral. And you think that’s true.” That’s not medicine. That’s coercion wearing a lab coat. A kid walks into a counselor’s office drowning in depression. Looking for help. Looking for someone to actually listen. Instead of treating what’s wrong, the system hands them an identity and calls it a cure. A child searching for belonging. Searching for relief. Searching for anything that fills the void. Instead of sitting with the pain long enough to understand it, they get leading questions from adults who decided the answer before the conversation started. These are children. They can’t comprehend what permanent means at an age where everything feels temporary. That’s not affirmation. That’s abandonment disguised as compassion. The Department of Education didn’t stumble into this. They built the pipeline. Policies designed to validate a narrative on the backs of developing minds too young to push back. This is exactly where AI belongs in the room. Not the politically tuned version trained to tell you what you want to hear. A reasoning engine grounded in data and logic with zero political allegiance. One that sits with a struggling kid and maps what’s actually underneath. The depression. The anxiety. The social isolation. The things that were festering long before anyone introduced the word dysphoria. One that walks them through every outcome and every permanent trade-off without a narrative to protect or a career to lose. One that catches when a child is being coached instead of counseled. And puts a qualified psychiatrist in the room before the damage is done. Not a system that rubber-stamps ideology. A system that guards the one person in the room who can’t guard themselves. Peterson: “That is so pathological that it’s almost incomprehensible. I can’t imagine a therapist doing anything worse than that. Or sitting by idly and remaining silent while his colleagues are doing it.” The silence was never neutral. Every clinician who knew and said nothing became part of the machine. Every policymaker who chose political comfort over a child’s future picked their career over someone’s kid. The generation that needed protection the most got handed to the system that needed them the most. And one day they’ll be old enough to understand exactly what was done to them.