No country for truth-tellers

“Billboard Chris” defends kids from gender ideology like it’s his full-time job—because it is.

In 2020, Chris Elston, a father of two from Vancouver, British Columbia, decided he could no longer stand idly by as he saw child after child fall prey to gender ideology. So, leaving behind a successful job in finance, he launched a new “career,” engaging people in street conversations while wearing a sandwich board with pithy messages. One reads, “Children cannot consent to puberty blockers.” Another says, “dad [noun]: a human male who protects his kids from gender ideology.”

Small wonder that, after four years, Elston has become an internet sensation. This real-world hero now travels the globe to win hearts and minds, expose the lies of gender ideology, and galvanize others to protect children. And he’s had an effect—such an effect that Australian authorities decided to weaponize a government bureaucracy to censor him on the social media platform X.

What triggered these officials, exactly? In February, Elston shared a Daily Mail article criticizing the appointment of gender ideology activist Teddy Cook to a panel of the World Health Organization. The article explained that Cook promotes deviant sexual practices, including bestiality and bondage. Elston took to X to state the obvious: that such a person has no business making global policy on mental health.

That’s when Australia’s “eSafety commissioner” demanded that X take down Elston’s post. With Elon Musk at the helm, X refused. The authorities then forced X to block the post in Australia, and X is now suing. Elston is challenging this censorship in court as well, with ADF International backing his legal defense.

Everybody has the right to speak their beliefs and seek to persuade others. This freedom lies at the very core of what has long made the West free. Censorship negates that freedom, and it is especially egregious when it keeps us from debating the most pressing issues of our time—issues that demand discussion.

Gender ideology is precisely such an issue. It has already left a trail of destruction, with thousands of children and young adults scarred for life, having become lifetime patients of the medical industrial complex. For too long, the debate over the rotten ideology driving this medical scandal has been suppressed. Yet the science is becoming increasingly clear. Today, a growing body of scientific literature highlights the dangers of these medical interventions, warning that cross-sex hormones can sterilize young people for life, impair cognitive development, and erode bone health.

One of the most common assertions we hear from activists is that “transition” is necessary to prevent people from committing suicide. That claim is flatly contradicted by the science. In 2011, an expansive Swedish study found that mortality rates among study participants became much worse after “transition” surgeries, with a lifetime suicide rate 19 times higher than the control group. In addition, last year, studies out of Denmark and Finland each reviewed more than 3,000 patients who had undergone transition procedures, both as children and adults, and more than 20 years of records revealed no meaningful improvement in mental health outcomes.

Most recently, a high-profile review commissioned by the English National Health Service found that “the evidence does not support the claim that gender-affirming treatment reduces suicide risk.” The same review echoed warnings that puberty blockers pose “potential risks to neurocognitive development, psychosexual development, and longer-term bone health” among children. These findings were published in the full Cass Review. In response, the British government placed an emergency ban on puberty blockers for minors, which recently withstood its first legal challenge. As the editor of the Boston Medical Journal concluded, “Offering treatments without an adequate understanding of benefits and harms is unethical.”

Thankfully, England is far from alone in undergoing this about-face. Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Belgium have all seen positive movement on this issue. Even so, gender ideology continues to exert a strong hold on certain governments. In Switzerland, for example, the government removed a teenage girl from her parents’ home after they declined to put her on puberty blockers. Her school, colluding with a local hospital, an activist group, and a child welfare agency, sought to “transition” her against the express will of her parents, culminating in a legal battle. The daughter, now 16, has lived in a government youth shelter for more than a year by court order and faces potentially life-altering physical interventions outside the protective authority of her parents.

Although such drastic steps aren’t yet happening in the United States, parental rights are being undermined here as well. Multiple schools have already “socially transitioned” students, using new names and pronouns in the classroom while actively keeping their parents in the dark. And California has now paved the way for even more “secret transitions” with its appalling new ban on parental notification policies.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once said, “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil.” Now is the time to raise our voices in defense of our children. No child has ever been born in the wrong body. And children cannot consent to puberty blockers. The world needs to hear these simple truths—from Billboard Chris and from all of us. When sham ideologies threaten the bodies and souls of children, speaking up is our sacred duty.