Because They Spoke Up, Kids Are Growing Up Whole

America began with an act of speech. Two hundred fifty years ago today, the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence and published its case against the most powerful government on earth.

Signing it was treason, punishable by death. The 56 signers kept their names secret for months, and Benjamin Rush later called the act signing “our own death warrants.” The First Amendment came fifteen years later.

This brave, American act, the act of true independence and brazen free speech is what Restore Childhood is honoring today.

As you may already know, in an absolutely incredible development, last month every doctor at the Children’s TRUE Center for Gender Diversity at Children’s Hospital Colorado told a court it could not make them prescribe puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones to patients under 18. Before deciding, the doctors hired their own lawyers and took stock of what prescribing now costs: criminal subpoenas in Texas, a $10 million settlement that ended five physicians’ careers, a 20-year ban at the Cleveland Clinic, a federal evidence review that found no reliable proof these drugs and surgeries help.

Those stakes did not exist five years ago. The people in this piece forced them, at enormous personal cost, and every doctor in that clinic said no because the people we spotlight below spoke out.

Today we honor some of the heroes who have saved countless children and families by speaking up and never backing down.

Dr. Eithan Haim. In May 2023, then a surgical resident, Haim gave journalist Christopher Rufo documents showing that Texas Children’s Hospital kept giving puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children as young as 11 after publicly claiming it had stopped. One month later, federal agents arrived at his door, on the morning of his residency graduation. The Biden DOJ charged him with four felony counts and sealed the indictment, so for months he did not know the exact charges. He and his wife Andrea spent their savings on lawyers. On January 24, 2025, the new DOJ dropped every count with prejudice. In May 2026, Texas Children’s settled with the Texas Attorney General, paid $10 million, cut ties with five physicians who performed the interventions, and agreed to open the nation’s first detransition clinic. The government now prosecutes the people who did this to children, not the doctor who exposed it.

Dr. Kristopher Kaliebe, a child and adolescent psychiatrist and professor at the University of South Florida, watched gender dysphoria cases climb from near zero across two decades of practice, then asked why in his profession’s own journal when almost no academic physician would. We published his essay and our conversation with him. His survey found 80 of 97 child psychiatrists, 82%, named social media a frequent driver of the surge. He co-authored the HHS review published late last year and also our Gender Toolkit for parents.

January Littlejohn learned in 2020 that her Florida school had built a “gender support plan” for her 13-year-old, new name, new pronouns, new bathrooms, in a meeting she was never told about. She sued in 2021 and lost on legal technicalities, though the courts agreed the school had infringed her rights. The Supreme Court declined her case in May. She has not stopped. She is an advocate with Do No Harm, and her early lawsuit helped map the parental-notification ground that later cases have used to win.

Maia Poet started identifying as transgender at 12 and moved to Israel at 20 to transition away from her family. On October 7, 2023, she woke to sirens and could not put on her binder. She came home a woman. At 26, she has spent her adult life helping others out, and she tells the whole story in our pages: her series “Why I Rejected Gender Affirming Care,” her reporting on the Jacob Lemay case, and her parents’ guide, “Out of the Gender Maze.”

Erin Lee signed a permission slip for art club in Fort Collins, Colorado in 2021. It was a Gender and Sexuality Alliance meeting, run by an outside group that told her 12-year-old that discomfort in her body meant she was transgender and that her parents might not be safe. Her daughter grew suicidal before finding her way back. Erin sued the district, founded Protect Kids Colorado, and produced the documentary Art Club. This spring her unpaid volunteers gathered more than 125,000 signatures and put three child-protection initiatives on Colorado’s November ballot, a feat experts called impossible. We told that story in March. The doctors who refused in Denver work in her state!

Erin Friday, a California attorney and lifelong Democrat, pulled her own 13-year-old back from a school that had socially transitioned her without a word to the parents. Then she turned her legal training into a weapon for other families. She testified against SB 107, the law that made California a sanctuary state for minors seeking hormones against their parents’ wishes. She served as the opposing attorney witness at the hearing for AB 1955, the school secrecy law the 9th Circuit blocked last month. She writes briefs supporting appeals across the country in secret school transition cases, filed an amicus brief in United States v. Skrmetti, and presented at an FTC workshop on pediatric gender medicine. She co-leads Our Duty USA.

Beth Bourne, another lifelong liberal Democrat, watched a Kaiser pediatrician offer her 13-year-old a gender-clinic referral during a visit for dizziness. She later posed as a nonbinary patient at Kaiser and walked out with a testosterone approval and a surgery referral, almost no questions asked. She films what she sees in Davis, California, one of the most progressive towns in America, and says out loud what her neighbors only whisper. We sat down with her in April: “What Does Courage Look Like in 2026?”

None of these people held positions of power when they started. A young surgical resident. A child psychiatrist. Mothers. A young woman who learned so much about herself at a moment of intense trauma.. They all have one thing in common though- a dogged persistence to use their voices for good- they are unstoppable, uncancellable, and utterly devoted to the well-being of our children.

The Declaration of Independence still works. The signers pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to say truth. Every person here paid a real price to do the same: prosecution, estrangement, isolation, litigation. So many children are alive and whole today because of what they have done.

So on this Indepence Day and always, remember to speak the truth. Let’s keep this republic. It has been a beautiful 250 years.

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