Restore Childhood’s Newsletter Podcast

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit restorechildhood.substack.comThree and a half years. Nearly 60 interviews. One documentary the mainstream press tried to ignore.“An institutional autopsy with a pulse.” Film Threat“The film has the facts, and outrage, on its side.” Hollywood in Toto“’15 Days’ skillfully documents the catastrophe. God forbid another pandemic occurs anytime soon, but if it does, ‘15 Days’ should serv…

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

The official trailer for "15 Days: The Real Story of America's Pandemic School Closures" releases today—the exact same day Randi Weingarten's book "Why Fascists Fear Teachers" hits shelves.The irony writes itself.You can watch the film HERE.Why I'm Fighting This FightI'm a NYC parent who co-founded Restore Childhood because our children deserved better—and they deserved to know that heroes fought for them when the world failed them.As a young New Yorker on 9/11, I learned that trauma has a window. The first few months after crisis are when we must reflect, share, and analyze—before people build protective walls and forget. I refused to let that happen to our children's stories.A Labor of Love, Three Years in the MakingThis journey began in April 2022. I'd just finished fighting to unmask kids and met Stephanie—a NYC public school teacher who'd lost her job for refusing vaccine mandates while the union stayed silent.What started with viral videos like "The Mask Will Come Off Tomorrow" became something bigger when an LA parent on Twitter connected me to legendary documentarian Eli Steele . A stranger who became family, giving us his expertise to preserve these stories.Our first interview? Dr. Kristen Walsh in her New Jersey home, reading us her unpublished March 2020 letter to the New York Times—proof that pediatricians knew schools shouldn't close. We didn't do "the best we could with the information we had." The information was there.The Road to TruthFrom Baltimore's Johns Hopkins with Dr. Carol Vidal to Stanford with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. From New York athletes like Garett “BAM” Morgan who lost football scholarships to the Kammer family boys who felt invisible on Zoom.We interviewed Maud Maron fighting alongside me in NYC. Martin Gurri exposing the censorship industrial complex. Tiffany Justice leading the parent revolution. Even Anya Kamenetz from NPR, who knew schools shouldn't stay closed.Our Mission: Heroes for the Next GenerationEvery child locked out of school and sports needs to see that when the world abandoned them, heroes stepped up. Doctors risked careers. Parents fought systems. Rare teachers like Stephanie sacrificed everything for students.We're showing kids that in their darkest hour, people fought for them—and they can fight for others too.A Race Against ForgettingI was deeply inspired by Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation—preserving the voices of Holocaust survivors before they were silenced forever.The teachers' unions are betting you'll forget what they did to America’s kids. They want you to believe "kids are resilient" and "everybody recovered."We're doing the opposite.As epidemiologist Dr. Houman Hemmati warns- if we don’t look back and demand accountability, "it will happen again and next time, it will be way worse."🚨 EXCLUSIVE PREMIERE 🚨 15 Days streams FREE exclusively on X for one week only- September 23-30. Follow us on X at @rstorechildhoodThe children are counting on us to remember their stories—and to show them their heroes.Watch. Share. Remember. 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

March 16th marked the anniversary of the beginning of pandemic lockdowns with the release of guidelines to “slow the spread” of the novel coronavirus causing COVID-19. The White House Coronavirus Task Force advised U.S. citizens to stay home for 15 days, stating that it would have “a resounding impact on public health” and “keep our most high-risk populations safe.” We now know that those guidelines did not work to keep high-risk populations safe, and it led to a devastating impact on our least vulnerable.A few weeks ago, we took the opportunity to reflect on this in our book club. We had a delightful conversation with the charming Gabrielle Bauer, author of Blindsight Is 2020, Reflections on Covid Policies from Dissident Scientists, Philosophers, Artists, and More. Watch the conversation here, and - although Substack is having a “moment” accurately generating an accurate transcript - read along if you wish. 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

Continuing the conversation about food and health, we were tickled to have Jayne Buxton join us late last month to talk about her fabulous and meticulously researched book The Great Plant Based Con. This book is a deep dive into the politics behind the vegan movement and the science, or lack thereof, that exhists about what we should be eating and why.You can watch or listen to our conversation and feel free to share your thoughts on how it might impact your food choices in comments below. We would love to hear from you! 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