The Tenpenny Files with Maria Keffler

Your teenager may be hearing answers about who they are long before you realize they are even asking the question.

By the time your child comes to you and says, “I think I was born in the wrong body,” where did that idea begin? Who introduced it? How long have they been thinking about it? And who have they been talking to while you knew nothing about it?

Maria Keffler believes those are questions parents need to ask much earlier.

Maria is a teacher, speaker, co-founder of Advocates Protecting Children, and author of Desist, Detrans, and Detox: Getting Your Child Out of the Gender Cult. She has worked with parents navigating gender dysphoria and transgender identification since 2018, and her concerns extend far beyond what happens inside a doctor’s office.

She calls it the “gender industry.”

Maria describes an interconnected world of schools, smartphones, social media, medical organizations, pharmaceutical interests, therapists, gender clinics, and cultural messaging that she believes can influence how young people interpret normal questions about identity, puberty, sexuality, and belonging.

Teenagers have always tried on identities while figuring out who they are. Maria argues that something has fundamentally changed when those ordinary struggles are met with a ready-made explanation that tells a young person the problem may be their body.

And that raises a much bigger question.

What happens when the adults and institutions parents have traditionally trusted reinforce the same message?

Maria takes us into the medical side of this story and asks a question I suspect most parents have never considered: Who actually writes the professional guidance your pediatrician may be following?

She describes how recommendations can emerge from relatively small professional committees and raises concerns about the financial and professional interests of people involved in gender-related medicine. Her argument is provocative, and it deserves to be heard in full rather than reduced to a headline.

But that isn’t the only distinction Maria makes that caught my attention.

Early in our conversation, she explains why she separates LGB from TQ.

I had never heard anyone explain the distinction quite the way she does.

Maria argues that sexual orientation and gender identity describe fundamentally different things and believes combining them under a single acronym helped gender activism gain cultural acceptance more quickly. She even describes what happened when she once asked a media organization to separate the terms in something she had written.

Their answer tells you something about how deeply language can shape a conversation before the conversation even begins.

Then we get to perhaps the most provocative argument in Desist, Detrans, and Detox.

Maria believes the dynamics surrounding gender ideology correspond with the characteristics traditionally associated with cult recruitment.

She walks through them.

Vulnerability. Intense acceptance when someone enters the group. A specialized vocabulary that identifies who belongs. Little tolerance for challenging certain beliefs. A powerful distinction between insiders and outsiders.

Most of the characteristics fit Maria’s theory immediately.

One did not.

Traditional cults have a charismatic leader whose authority cannot be questioned.

Maria couldn’t find that person.

Then something clicked.

Who she believes occupies that position changes the entire comparison, and I’m going to let Maria explain that herself.

All of this eventually brings the conversation back to the place that matters most: your home.

Because cultural arguments become very different when it is your son or daughter sitting across from you.

What do you say?

Maria’s answer begins with something many parents have forgotten how to do: stay calm enough to keep the conversation open while remaining the parent.

We talk about boundaries, discipline, listening, asking questions, saying no, and why Maria believes parents have drifted too far from understanding their proper role in their children’s lives.

She also identifies three influences she repeatedly tells families dealing with transgender identification to examine: public school, smartphones, and social media.

Her recommendations can be difficult. Maria admits that herself.

But she also shares what she hears from families who decide to make those difficult changes.

The book takes this much further.

Desist, Detrans, and Detox gives parents the deeper framework we could only begin to address here, including communication strategies, desistance, detransition, family relationships, and practical guidance for navigating gender dysphoria.

Our conversation lets you hear why Maria reached these conclusions.

Her book gives you far more of what to do with them.

Even parents who have never heard the words “gender dysphoria” inside their home should pay attention to this conversation.

Your child is growing up surrounded by people and institutions competing to explain the world to them.

The question is whether you are part of that conversation early enough to matter.

Because by the time your child asks the question, someone else may have already given them the answer.

Meet our Guest

Maria Keffler is a teacher, speaker, author, and co-founder of Advocates Protecting Children, an organization providing resources and guidance to parents, churches, schools, organizations, and individuals responding to gender ideology and activism.

Maria began working on these issues in 2018. In March 2019, she joined four other parents to establish the Arlington Parent Coalition, a watchdog organization focused on what children were being taught about sex and gender in public education, parental rights, and student safety.

She is the author of Desist, Detrans, and Detox: Getting Your Child Out of the Gender Cult, a resource for families navigating gender dysphoria, transgender identification, desistance, and detransition.

Maria is also co-author of Time-Tested Parenting: Raising Healthy Kids in a Hostile World, which grew from something she and her colleagues repeatedly encountered while helping families: parents needed practical guidance on communication, boundaries, child development, and the responsibility of being a parent.

Through Advocates Protecting Children, Maria helps provide books, family guidance, resources for evaluating therapists and youth programs, parent support, and Out Path, a free app connecting families with resources and conversation groups.

Website

Advocates Protecting Children: https://www.advocatesprotectingchildren.org/

Book:  https://amzn.to/4fK8jgE

X: https://x.com/MariaKeffler