In 2017, Lily Burns’ 16-year-old son, Michael* declared he was transgender.
“My reaction to him was, ‘No, you’re not,’” Burns said in an exclusive interview with IW Features. She told him, “I don’t believe you.”
But Michael had already fallen deep into the trenches of gender ideology, possibly with the help of his Denver-area school.
Thinking they would “put the brakes on this,” Burns said she and her husband took Michael to a therapist in their network at a Kaiser Permanente clinic.
Unfortunately, then unbeknownst to the Burnses, Kaiser Permanente is one of the greatest offenders in the gender ideology space, having spearheaded medical experimentation on gender-confused minors both as an insurer and as a clinical provider of care. Several detransitioners who were medicalized as minors, including Chloe Cole and Kayla Lovdahl, are now suing Kaiser Permanente for malpractice.
“After three visits with the Kaiser psychologist, the determination was made that my son had gender dysphoria,” Burns said. “I looked back on the letter the psychologist wrote in diagnosing him, and there were two primary reasons why the psychologist deemed my son to have this affliction.”
In retrospect, the reasons were “insane,” she added. “The first was that his circle of friends was girls. The second was that he went on a date with a boy once.”
“I trusted that a board-certified psychologist would not put my son on the wrong path. It took me a couple of years to actually come to terms with that,” Burns continued.
She discovered only later that this psychologist had posted in a World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) Facebook group in early 2018 concerns about the surge in female patients identifying as transgender and regretting the medicalization they had undergone. Burns’ son, for context, began seeing the psychologist in mid-2018. But when Burns had asked her son’s psychologist what the regret rate was at that time, the psychologist had responded that it was “minuscule.”
In September 2024, Burns filed a complaint with Colorado’s Department of Regulatory Agencies’ Division of Professions and Occupations that she was not provided complete information about medical transition by the Kaiser psychologist and thus was not able to provide informed consent. In just three months’ time, the board decided that the psychologist had not committed “violation of the practice act or rules that would warrant disciplinary action.”
In retrospect, Burns thinks the psychologist was a dyed-in-the-wool activist. About a year ago, she said, she heard a detransitioner telling her story on local radio. The detransitioner mentioned a Kaiser psychologist who put her on path to transition, whom Burns recognized as the same psychologist who had put Michael on track to transition.
After the Kaiser psychologist diagnosed Michael with gender dysphoria, Burns said they were referred to Children’s Hospital Colorado. There, Michael was prescribed estrogen by the endocrinologist.
“It was only a few visits to [Children’s Hospital Colorado],” she said. And in those visits, the doctor would measure her son’s hormone levels. “It looked like there was a science to it, in terms of making sure that there wasn’t too much estrogen.”
“Although,” Burns added, laughing dryly, “do you know how much estrogen a man’s supposed to have? That’s kind of silly.”
As Michael was only three months out from turning 18 and going to college, she and her husband provided consent for their son’s hormonal transition as “a peace offering.” She was worried that if she and her husband rejected medicalization, Michael would cut them off and pursue a more extreme surgical transition just to spite them.
“I thought, ‘Well, I might as well just try to stay involved,’”she explained.
Burns said she and her son have a good relationship today, even as he continues to identify as transgender. And while he does currently take estrogen, he has not undergone any surgical transition. While she “beat [herself] up for years because [she] felt like she had handed her son over to predators,” she now believes she has the “best outcome she could have had”—a close relationship with her son.
At the same time, she believes parents today have more options than she did nearly a decade ago.
“I think I’m lucky, but the world’s changing now,” she said, telling IW Features that she thinks a parent who says “no” today might have more success and support systems than she had at the time her son transitioned. “If your child says, ‘I’m transgender,’ say, ‘No, you’re not, give me your phone, where did you hear about this?’”
Parents, she believes, should put their foot down in the face of this ideology—especially in health care settings. Indeed, Burns recommends parents not defer to the so-called psychological and medical experts who will push transition on their children.
“This was where I yielded my parental authority, and I should not have had. I always had doubts that gender transition was right, but I deferred to experts,” she said. “He was 17, he was geeky, he was spectrum-y. And, yeah, they got him.”
*A pseudonym is used to protect the storyteller’s identity.
