Gabrielle Clark’s counseling group, Affirming Reality, has a simple piece of advice for parents dealing with transgender ideation in their children: “Stay out of traps, but also bait your own traps so that the woke will fall into them.”
The idea for Affirming Reality originated in 2021, when Clark responded to her own child’s expressions of transgender ideology by crafting a plan to help her daughter affirm her own biological sex. Now, Clark does the same for other parents whose sons and daughters are pressured in schools and online to express a “gender identity” different from their biological sex.
“Affirming reality means recognizing biological reality, objective truth,” Clark told IW Features.
Affirming Reality exists to help parents navigate the harsh realities of what their children face every day in the age of social media and online influences who push transgenderism on children.
“We get accused of being conversion therapy, but I don’t know how we can be conversion therapy when we’re just seeing what’s real and not,” Clark said. “And not only that, we’re not therapists. We don’t work with any of the children. We work with their parents. We’re a parenting coaching program. We teach parents how to parent their children out of this madness and how to correctly implement and live authoritative parenting in a technical age.”
The name of Clark’s organization comes from her steadfast belief that the manipulation of language is the first line of attack from the Left on this issue. Indeed, the group’s title is meant to turn a favorite leftist catch-phrase – “gender-affirming care” – on its head, she explained.
Throughout her interview with IW Features, Clark used several other phrases meant to unravel the Left’s narrative about transgenderism. For instance, where the Left refers to cross-sex hormones, surgery, and social transition as “gender-affirming care,” Clark called it “sex rejection.”
“I call the woke language … parallel language messaging, and I teach parents how to recognize parallel language messaging, how to stop using it themselves. Most of the time when parents come to me, they’re already indoctrinated too,” Clark said. “I have to teach them about parallel language messaging so that they can weed out the woke, because it’s not always obvious to them.”
Specifically, Clark advises the parents she counsels to avoid the use of preferred pronouns, a linguistic device she calls a “trap” to get parents to unknowingly cede ground to the Left on gender.
Parents seeking help through Affirming Reality are invited to fill out a form requesting a 15-minute consultation, which is usually conducted by Dr. Nikki Johnson, an apprentice with the program and pediatric critical care doctor based in Ohio.
“We assess the level of commitment that you have, and we assess the situation. Whatever the situation is with the children—and it doesn’t matter how old the child is, even if you have a 30-year-old kid—we’ll still help you if you’re ready to do the hard work. And then we set up time for sessions, and we go from there,” Clark said.
Clark is committed to working with parents for as long as they may need her services. But “when the child desists” and abandons gender ideology, she said, “my job is over.”
The practical resources Clark offers to parents of children experiencing “sex rejection” include therapy referrals for the mother, medical support to treat the child’s comorbidities, and recommendations for lawyers in cases where the family suffered medical or other malpractice.
In one of the first phases of the counseling service, Clark and Johnson recommend “extrication and detox,” which includes a digital detox for both parent and child, paired with bond-building exercises, such as a family road trip.
But social media isn’t the only environment where gender ideology runs amok. In fact, to Clark, one of the main hotbeds of indoctrination against which parents must remain vigilant is the classroom:whether in a public or private school, or even at home.
“What a lot of people don’t know is they think that if they homeschool their kids they’re going to get their kids away from it. Sorry. No. That’s not how that happens,” Clark said. “We have some conservative homeschooling Christians here who thought they were safe.”
Ultimately, however, Clark says that modern parents are going to have to adjust their parenting techniques regarding technology if they wish to avoid the trap of gender ideology.
“We were told that it was OK. ‘It’s OK to let your kid have a phone, it’s OK to let them be on social media and Snapchat, and it’s totally OK to let them play Roblox. That’s for kids,’” she said. “We’re seeing how all of this is shaking out, and how bad all of it really was, and so we’re having to learn how to get back to reality and create challenges for our children to overcome.”
