WATCH NOW: What Does Courage Look Like in 2026?

I’ve been watching Beth Bourne’s videos for a while now, and every time one comes across my feed I feel two things simultaneously: inspired and a little terrified for her. She goes alone, just her phone held at just the right angle, into school board meetings, university encampments, anti-ICE protests, Pride festivals, and hotel lobbies in Hawaii, and she says what almost no one else in her zip code will say out loud. She is soft-spoken, a mother, and she is absolutely unafraid.Beth is the Yolo County chair of Moms for Liberty and was, until she was laid off last June, a program coordinator at UC Davis in Davis, California. Davis is one of the most progressive small cities in America, where roughly 65–70% of residents are registered Democrats and the local university, medical system, schools, and therapy community have been almost entirely captured by gender ideology. Beth has been reporting on this capture from the inside for years, documenting with meticulous records how institutions like Kaiser Permanente tried to put her own daughter on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, how UC Davis has constructed an entire pipeline, from free binders to free surgeries, to medicalize 1 in 22 of its students as transgender, and how the schools are teaching children that cross-dressing is “healthy and normal.”You’ve probably seen at least one of her videos. In June 2024, she was on a family vacation at the Alohilani Resort in Waikiki when she encountered drag performers filming a commercial in the hotel lobby — unavoidable, with her son upstairs. She spoke up, was briefly handcuffed by Honolulu police, refunded her entire week’s stay, and had no regrets. The video has accumulated millions of views. UC Davis then issued a public statement condemning her comments, calling them “deeply hurtful” — without noting that she had been on vacation, speaking as a private citizen, with no UC Davis students or colleagues involved. She pointed this out, and also noted that when a UC Davis professor told her to “put a gun in your mouth, you piece of s**t” at a pro-Palestine encampment on campus, the university issued no statement at all.I wanted to talk to her because courage really is contagious, and she is not getting anywhere near enough attention for what she’s doing. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.Natalya: Tell me a little about yourself. You’re based in Davis. Were you born in California?Beth: I was born in Bethesda, Maryland. My father worked in the Foreign Service, so I grew up overseas — mostly in Mexico City, from 3rd through 8th grade. When we moved back to the U.S., it was to suburban San Diego, and I felt like an outsider. I’d lived in other countries, I knew governments could lie, I knew there was corruption in the world. My parents were conservative. My mother is a registered nurse.After college I became a liberal Democrat — probably until the last few years.Natalya: And when did you first start noticing what was happening with gender ideology?Beth: It was one of my daughter’s classmates in kindergarten, around 2012 or 2013. The mother — very educated, Columbia degree — announced that her second son of three boys was transgender. He was three years old. All my liberal friends were so supportive. I had this feeling in the pit of my stomach: this doesn’t seem right. How would you know a three-year-old is transgender?But I didn’t do much about it. I noticed that it kept being white, liberal, highly educated women — often lesbian couples — who were announcing transgender children at my daughter’s elementary school. And I didn’t really dig in.Then my daughter announced a trans identity in seventh grade. That would have been 2017 or 2018. Her psychiatrist recommended I read Jesse Singal’s article in The Atlantic about parents who had held firm, whose daughters were desisting. That was almost all I had. I found Fourth Wave Now, I found Will Malone. But I wasn’t on Twitter yet — that would have made a big difference.Natalya: You mentioned Kaiser Permanente. What happened there?Beth: My daughter and I went to her pediatrician — my ex-husband came too — and she was just there because she was feeling dizzy. My ex was already using her new name and pronouns. The Kaiser pediatrician was so excited. She said, oh, I hear your dad’s calling you Ian, would you like me to change your chart? What pronouns do you use? And then she suggested my daughter go to the Kaiser gender clinic in Oakland — a one-stop shop with an endocrinologist, gender specialist, OBGYN. A complete medical pathway, offered in a single appointment, to a 13-year-old who came in for dizziness.I called the next day furious. I said: you just put this idea in her head that there’s a medical pathway without asking us if we’d even support it.A few months later, my daughter wrote a letter — there are templates online for this — saying she’d done research and wanted to go on puberty blockers and testosterone. Her citations were Planned Parenthood, WPATH, and the Endocrine Society. She was a very smart 13-year-old and she just believed them.Natalya: What did you do?Beth: I was in a lucky position because her psychiatrist told me quietly that a young teen in Davis had come to her saying they were non-binary, and at the very first appointment with an endocrinologist the parents were pressured to put their child on blockers. The psychiatrist told me: I don’t think it’s safe for your daughter to meet with any medical people right now.So I begged her to tell my daughter and my ex-husband that we wouldn’t medicalize anything until she was 18. And I remember this appointment — I think there was actually relief on my daughter’s face. Like: oh, my parents have said no, so that’s what I tell my friends when they ask why I haven’t done it.Natalya: She was looking for guardrails.Beth: Exactly. And the parents who are saying what do you want? Should we make the appointment? — those kids don’t have that. I feel for them so much.Natalya: What happened with your daughter ultimately?Beth: We’ve been estranged for almost three and a half years, since her 17th birthday — right after we came home from a big trip to Japan and Thailand. She still identifies as non-binary, as far as I can tell. But she goes by a traditional female name now, and she’s a beautiful young woman.The Sacramento Bee did a big front-page feature on us — framed as the “anti-trans mother and the non-binary child.” My daughter spoke to them too. It makes me uncomfortable to share things about her, but someone has to tell the story.I think there’s also loyalty to her dad and stepmom, who affirmed this all along. It’s hard to say to everyone who supported you: maybe Mom was right. Maybe I’m just a young woman.Natalya: I’ve talked to parents who say the community won’t let kids leave, even when they want to.Beth: Yes. It’s welcoming. The kids are quirky, fun, theater kids, loving and accepting. And then they have a mom who, in this town, is considered the most dangerous person around. At 17 or 18, of course you’re going to want to be with your friends.Natalya: Let’s talk about what you’re doing now. I keep seeing these videos — sometimes scary ones — of you going out alone. What is the strategy?Beth: It built up incrementally. I started going to school board meetings, reading prepared scripts. I hosted public forums at the Davis library — I brought Colin Wright out to speak, did an event on fairness in girls’ sports. That event got shut down by the librarian, then the bomb threats started, and it made national news.Then I was in Hawaii and ran into those drag queens in the hotel lobby. I realized: this is more powerful than a school board comment in some ways. Having your phone out, saying something, recording it — that reaches people differently.Then at the UC Davis pro-Palestine encampment, I showed up with my gender-critical signs even though that wasn’t my issue. I wanted the Jewish students to know someone was there. A professor told me to put a gun in my mouth. That went viral too. The university never apologized, and I’m sure she didn’t even get written up. Dennis Prager talked about it on his show the next day.Most recently I’ve been going to the anti-ICE protests here in Davis and in Winters — hundreds of students marching during class time, with their principals and teachers. I show up with a sign that says Trump, Vance: Make Women’s Sports Female Again, and they attack me with bottles and cans. The school principal blames me. I’m like: you’re the one who told your students to leave class.Natalya: You go alone?Beth: Always. I don’t want to put someone else in that situation. And I’ve gotten better at holding my phone so I can get myself and the other person in the frame at the same time.Natalya: Doesn’t it scare you? After everything that’s happened — the political violence we’ve been seeing — I watch your videos and I feel amazed that you’re doing this.Beth: I think it’s been incremental. I feel stronger now than I did five years ago, able to take a little more criticism, stand a little more ground. But I’m very aware of personal safety. I know where the police are. I don’t tell people where I’m going to be next. And I’m careful about which cities — Davis is a small town. Seattle or Portland or New York would be different.Natalya: Do any of the young trans-identified people you talk to ever reach out afterward and say thank you?Beth: There’s a lot of positive feedback, actually. There was one young man still in high school who approached me, said he was on estrogen and hated his body — he was sort of calling me names at first. And I just kept saying: your body is perfect. You need to think about this a little more. You’re wonderful.A few weeks later I saw him at the Pride Festival. He was laughing, and he came up and said, remember what you said about me? He hadn’t dropped his trans identity. But he didn’t see me as evil anymore. He saw me as a mom, or just a human, saying: maybe think about this differently.I hope they get that I’m not trying to hurt them. I’m trying to say: someone is taking advantage of the normal discomfort of being a teenager. That’s all I’m trying to say.You can follow Beth Bourne on X where she documents gender ideology in California schools, shares her investigations of UC Davis, and posts her field videos.If this conversation moved you, please consider becoming a paid subscriber or making a tax-deductible donation at restorechildhood.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit restorechildhood.substack.com/subscribe