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I was a little late, and I felt bad. I didn’t know how many people were going to show up to the protest. But as I drove past the Planned Parenthood—or rather, the giant complex that included a Planned Parenthood—I thought I needn’t have worried, because there they all were, lined up and waving signs and having a great time. My heart warmed. This is awesome! What a great turnout for Prisha!
Prisha Mosley is a woman who spent years believing she was a man, receiving hormone therapy under the care of doctors and therapists whom she is now suing for damages. The lawsuit is being filed in her former home state of North Carolina, although she is now, like me, a Michigander. She spends much of her time traveling and advocating for gender detransitioners like herself. But she decided she wanted to do something in her own state. So last month, she told her followers she planned to picket the Lansing Planned Parenthood. Not everyone is aware that Planned Parenthood provides cross-sex hormones to gender-confused young people, including teenagers age 16 or older. Prisha now understands too well what kind of irreversible havoc these hormones can wreak on the body. She went on testosterone at age 17. As an adult, she followed up with a double mastectomy, though she stopped short of the “bottom surgery” that would have created the illusion of male genitalia. Yet, as she’s bravely shared in detailed testimony, the testosterone alone caused permanent damage to her sex organs.
I had only met Prisha once at an event, briefly, and wished I could support her more. But now that she was coming to my neck of the woods, I was excited to sign up. I told her I’d messaged a local priest in hopes that maybe a church or two could coordinate with her. It was a Planned Parenthood protest, after all. Christians have some experience in this department.
That coordination never did happen, sadly. But that was okay, because plenty of Prisha’s own friends had shown up. Or so I thought.
“Hey!” I greeted everyone. “Got a sign I could hold?” “Yeah!” they said, “We got signs.” They had cookies too. Wow, this was well organized. I petted a friendly dog. That was when I got my first good look at one of the sign slogans, which had flashed by in a blue-pink blur as I drove past.
Oh crap.
I walked away and checked my phone. Prisha had texted to let me know she was going to be late herself. No kidding.
I deliberated a bit, but I decided to walk back over and reintroduce myself to this crew. I wasn’t actually with them, I confessed. I was a journalist on the other side. But I was interested in their story too. “Oh Christ,” one girl said in disgust. When I mentioned Prisha’s name, she rolled her eyes. “Yeah, we know all about her.” She didn’t want to share how they’d learned what date Prisha chose for her protest, which was kept off of Twitter in hopes this wouldn’t happen. (Although I needn’t have asked—all someone had to do was sign up for Prisha’s email list in bad faith.) “If you ain’t here to support trans folks,” the girl told me, “then you can just walk away right now.”
I happily complied. A less worthy part of me wondered how long I could have kept up a friendly charade while waiting for Prisha to arrive. It could have been fun. But I was too honest.
Meanwhile, I noticed two older pro-life picketers keeping a bit of distance, a man and a woman. They explained that they were with 40 Days for Life, an international group that coordinates volunteers to pray over Planned Parenthood locations during opening hours. More volunteers would be coming in shifts throughout the day. I explained who I was and what this was all about. By now, I was worried that nobody was coming. We would need all the friendly co-picketers we could get. A bullhorn-amplified voice drifted over as we talked. “Just so you know, this clinic doesn’t even offer abortions. So these people just want to harass women.” The man shook his head. “That’s a lie,” he said quietly. “Just go to the website.” Indeed, while the clinic doesn’t provide surgical abortions (though it used to), it does provide medical abortions.
I sat in the car and killed time on my phone until Prisha finally arrived with her boyfriend, Eli, over an hour later than planned. She looked exhausted from the commute. I knew why: Besides the health issues and chronic pain she already deals with, she was secretly pregnant, due in June.
Their back seat was a jumble of foam boards and other sign-making materials. Prisha explained: Yes, she’d promised she would bring signs, but turned out she hadn’t actually been able to make more than a couple. She just got too tired, and she didn’t plan this very well, and pregnancy brain was screwing everything up. And, Eli pointed out with cheerful bluntness, she’d picked a weekday, in February, announced only a couple of weeks in advance. So of course nobody else was here, except maybe one or two people who might come later. “I’m sorry,” Prisha said meekly. On top of everything else, she’d also forgotten to bring a jacket. Eli gave her his, though it took a while for her to stop shivering in the February wind. It’s midwinter spring right now, but midwinter spring in Michigan is still chilly.
I took stock. We had foam boards. We had sticky letters. Did we have markers? We did not, but we could buy some from one of several arts and crafty stores in the vast complex. So off we went, realizing partway through our walk that we could have just driven, but this was more fun. After a bit of wandering, we found what we needed at Five Below.
Okay, so we had boards, and now we had markers. What were we doing with them, again? Prisha’s best sign with sticky letters said “HRT [does not equal sign] Planning For Parenthood.” Cool, but would anyone know what HRT stood for (Hormone Replacement Therapy)? What else could we come up with? She wasn’t sure. “Um, how about…” and she rattled off a bullet point she’d stored away from her intensely detailed research—completely factual, and completely unsuitable. “How about Trans Care Is Not Health Care?” I floated. They liked that. We also liked “Believe Detransitioners.” I debated whether to trust the sticky letters or use a marker. In hindsight, I should have trusted the letters, but we had notions of variety. Prisha didn’t trust her own handwriting (or shaky hands), so Eli rested the board on their car and laid down a very rough guide in pencil, explaining that his handwriting was pretty bad too. That made three of us. He suggested collapsing “is not” to a “does not equal” sign in my slogan. This seemed like a good idea at the time, but I would later realize I had no clue just how fat my lines needed to be, and in the final analysis my “does not equal” might as well have been an “equals.” Plus, the slash wasn’t going the wrong way—granted, Eli had drawn that in pencil, but I didn’t fix it, for reasons unknown.
“Hey, can you spare a dollar?” A young woman had walked up behind us while we worked. Her hoodie was zipped up against the wind, her hands stuffed in the pockets. Prisha fished out a couple, apologizing that she didn’t have more. “That’s okay,” the woman said humbly, “Just anything. I just got out of the hospital…”
“Of course she has money!” someone said. “She’s from North Carolina!” It was a young man from the trans rights group, biking around the complex. He wore dark glasses and a blue-pink mask. For the first time that day (but not the last) Prisha explained that she lives in Michigan now. Then she explained our weird sign to the begging girl, who wished us luck once she understood, then wandered off on her way.
“I just don’t know how to say no,” Prisha said quietly. “I wish I was an omniscient all-powerful billionaire.”
The man on the bike had spooked Eli. He wanted to park somewhere safer, maybe by the Bank of America so they’d be close to a security camera. I also liked this idea, so we moved both our cars accordingly. But we soon had more company. This time I recognized the surly, stocky girl who had sent me on my way before—the one wearing an orange knit cap and a shirt saying “Protect Trans Kids” between a knife and a rose, tattoo-style. She walked up to Prisha’s car with her phone out, saying she’d noticed that Prisha just posted a selfie near the bank. Weren’t we here to protest Planned Parenthood, haha? Yes, haha, Prisha said, but we couldn’t park right outside Planned Parenthood. The girl laughed at us and walked away.
A few minutes later, we started to walk back to the picket zone, bad signs in tow. The same begging girl met us halfway. “Hey,” she said, looking concerned, “That guy on the bike, he just said ‘Watch your back.’ I don’t know what he meant…” We tried to be reassuring. She became righteously indignant on our behalf. It wasn’t right, she said, how those guys were acting. “Look, causes are causes.” She told us to carry on, and “Don’t give two fucks what those guys think.”
We separated, but I felt a pang as I watched her walking away. I caught up and asked if I could pray for her. She agreed. She told me her name was Nicole. She let me put an arm around her. I felt her shoulders shaking.
Before we made it to the picket zone, a mall cop rolled up to inform us that not only could we not park outside the Planned Parenthood, we couldn’t park anywhere in the whole vast complex. By now I wasn’t keen to be noticed approaching my car, so I chose to move with Prisha and Eli, barely squeezing into a tiny free spot in their cluttered back seat. We found an empty Sears lot, which didn’t thrill Eli. And still, no one else had come. I wondered if the pro-lifers I’d met before were still there and volunteered to go check, or update new replacements. “Are you sure?” Prisha asked, anxious for my welfare. For some reason, I wasn’t very worried.
“Here comes the journalist!” the bullhorn guy announced as I walked past. I avoided eye contact and greeted the next small group of pro-lifers who’d arrived for their shift. One of them was a man, thankfully. He said he’d be happy to stay for longer than his planned slot.
Bullhorn guy kept up a running bullhorn commentary on my way back. “I promise we don’t bite. But if we do, it’ll be consensual.”
The three of us were greeted by mock cheers as we made our way over to finally do what we had come to do. “Here they are! Welcome! They’ve come to Michigan all the way from North Carolina!” Ah, so this was to be a running joke. “We’re from Michigan, you assholes,” I said.
At first, they stayed on their bit of turf while we stayed on ours. “Want a cookie?” someone taunted. “Got cookies, got trans rights!” They had attached what looked like a giant garbage bag to a nearby dumpster with “Trans Rights And Cookies” in giant black letters. “You know,” Eli remarked in his dry way, “I’m actually okay with them hanging that sign on the dumpster. Sometimes it just writes itself.”
Passing cars honked incessantly. We guessed this was positive, and we guessed it wasn’t for us. I wondered quietly if anyone even realized that we constituted a distinct group, though I hoped the fact that we stood apart with the pro-lifers might help a bit. Gosh, my marker signs sucked. I added a sticker to fill an empty corner on the “Believe Detransitioners” sign Prisha was holding. It came from her stash, all featuring a lizard logo. Female detransitioners have claimed the lizard as a mascot, because it sheds body parts in an attempt to escape predators.
As I snapped a few pictures, I noticed one fellow with a sign saying “God Is Trans.” We made eye contact, and he gave me a middle finger.
The pro-lifers all welcomed Prisha and listened to her story with sympathy. We chatted about how she used to view conservatives when she was in “the cult,” as she now calls it. There was a script she’d been handed, a narrative she implicitly trusted. In this narrative, we (conservatives, Christians, pro-lifers) were monsters. We hated her and all her friends. We lacked only the power to round them up and send to them to the gas chambers. It seems insane to think now, watching the crew on the corner. But a couple years ago, she would have been standing with them.
Another male-female pair joined us later, both Catholics with rosaries out. I talked to the man, Brent Heyer, who wore a perpetual smile and spoke with serene confidence. He’s given nearly 30 years to the pro-life cause. His motto is “promoting life from the moment of conception to the last natural breath.” Bad press has never bothered him. He always liked to say if he made it into the Pro-Life Weekly, great, and if he made it into the Pro-Choice Weekly, also great. “We’re here for mothers to choose life and save their babies and love them and raise them up as children of heaven.” He could tell me all about this particular clinic—how many surgical abortionists they used to have on staff (three), how many medical abortions per hour they offer now (up to eight). “In the end,” he said, “you’re either with God, or you’re with the evil one.”
I decided to take a short video with Brent’s permission, but the minute I hit record and asked him to talk about his work, the counter-protesters noticed and swarmed us. While they whooped and danced, Brent carried on listing all the concrete ways he had seen women assisted in crisis pregnancies—with housing, rent, schooling, daily necessities. The woman with him remained quiet, but she raised her rosary a little higher.
Among the many trans activist signs in the background, you can see one decorated with the question, “Why r u SO OBSSESSED [sic] with us?” I reciprocated it, just to see what they would say. To my disappointment, they didn’t appreciate the irony. One of the other pro-lifers—the one who had agreed to extend his shift—came over to join the fun, grinning and dancing along with his “Love Them Both” sign.
Prisha decided to tell a couple of the older pro-life women about her pregnancy, which delighted them. We especially loved one lady who seemed like the whole world’s gently worrying grandmother. She furrowed her brow as she watched our counter-protesters dashing across the street and back. Occasionally they rushed to exchange a few words with the friendly driver of a stopped car. “I’m just worried about them, running out into the street like that.”
Brent and his friend stuck around for a while, maybe even extending their shift too for all I knew. “These guys actually seem to have inner peace,” Prisha reflected, as Brent’s booming voice launched into another Hail Mary.
Neither Prisha nor Eli is religious. At one point, Prisha described herself as a “gender atheist,” meaning she doesn’t believe you can have a body of one sex and a soul of the other. For her, this is just one more instance of not believing in souls. Eli tells me his grandmother took him to some services when he was a kid, but nothing really stuck. He’s trying to raise his own child now, a girl he had in college before he met Prisha. “What is sacred to you?” I asked him. He thought a moment. “Innocence,” he said. A couple other things came to mind, like freedom of speech. Then another pause. “Children.”
A young black man named Jeremy joined us with a sign that said “Children’s Lives Matter” — crafted, I was glad to see, much better than ours. It turned out that he knew nothing about who Prisha was, or even much about trans/detrans wars generally. But he spoke with a fierce innocence, explaining he had woken up that morning and just “felt a nudge” to come down to the Planned Parenthood with a sign, although he wasn’t even intending it to refer specifically to abortion. He said he was a father himself, and he wanted to speak for “the children who have already been born” who have suffered sexual abuse, like he did. Jeremy had strong opinions on many things, I quickly realized, from child abuse to police overreach to medical malpractice. He listened seriously as we told him Prisha’s story. “Doctors should stop hiding behind a false oath. Doctors are supposed to be healers and they’re not. They’re misdiagnosing and mistreating people. I was misdiagnosed myself.” I agreed, even though we weren’t exactly talking about the same things. “Speak the truth,” he said with feeling. “They’re afraid of the truth because of what might happen, what might not happen, because the people who are on the other side of the truth, they can’t handle it.”
Though he had many things besides abortion on his mind, Jeremy said he had always been inspired by the 40 Days for Life volunteers. “I see them out here praying every day. So this seemed like a good place to stand.”
I followed Prisha to take a break in her car, where she shared more of her story. She talked in fast bursts, packed with detail. Mental illness runs in her family. She uses her platform to talk openly about her struggles with borderline personality disorder, which she told me among other things has made it difficult for her to stay rooted in any one place. The mania is constantly compelling her to pick up sticks and move. She talked about her “glitter family” in Florida, a toxic little commune of men and women who had promised her safety and happiness—and freedom to be her true self, of course. Before she knew it, she was in a throuple. Eventually, she extricated herself and moved, again. “Life is crazy,” she said. “But I really love people. I don’t hate anyone.”
I tapped at my phone, looking over the pictures I’d taken. “Can I just say, you look really cute,” Prisha suddenly said. “You’re just, like, so concentrated.” I laughed. A minute later she apologized in her shy, timid voice. “I hope you didn’t mind my saying that. I mean I just met you a few minutes ago and we’re already friends, so…”
When I asked if she wanted to go back yet, she said she might, but she didn’t want to leave me behind and make me “feel abandoned.” Or maybe I preferred to leave with her? This is how she is all the time, she explained, always going back and forth in her head.
It took a long time for her to trust anyone after experiencing abuse as a young girl. This isn’t the first time she’s been pregnant. As a teenager, she was raped, then had a miscarriage. “When people were kind to me, my first thought was what do you want? What’s about to happen to me?”
A local mom named Katie finally joined us, the only person on Prisha’s list who made it. Katie radiated casual Midwestern mom charm. She’d brought snacks, because of course she had. She spoke in a soft, quirky accent I couldn’t quite place, somewhere between Michigan and Minnesota. We handed her a purple marker, which she artfully put to work on a spare foam board. I told her I was a journalist, and I was recording some bits of audio, if she didn’t mind. “Sweet, dude!”
“I feel bad,” she said. “I’m a Democrat. Like, I let this happen.” For Katie, “this” isn’t just an abstraction. She has a teenage daughter experimenting with transgenderism, under the influence of her grown son. But she still has some hope for her daughter, who goes to a Catholic school that doesn’t engage in “social transition” (i.e., making everyone defer to a child’s preferred name or pronouns). Katie grew up Catholic herself, though you’re more likely to find her in a good Protestant church on Sundays, even if out of long habit they’re still “they” and Catholics are still “we.” Protestant communion makes more sense to her, and the preaching is better. “They really know the Bible, like really well. I mean they can, like, quote stuff like crazy.” We laugh about the old joke that Catholics don’t read the Bible. “We’re, like, missing out! There’s good stuff in there.” All that being said, she’ll choose Catholic over public school for her kids any day. Granted, “Being Catholic doesn’t equal you’re not into the trans stuff,” which she finds bizarre, because “God doesn’t make mistakes.” But, “So far, they’ve been good, so I’ve been like, yay.”
As for her son, “I don’t see him coming out of it. He’s got a girlfriend, and they’re ‘lesbians,’ and it’s like, really?”
Things became more intense when a young man in a pink skirt walked over to film Prisha for an extended interrogation. I didn’t see their first contact, but Prisha told me later that he was asking who’d paid her to be here. (I could have told him no one, unless he counted the markers I bought at Five Below.) I quietly counter-filmed as much as I could, though the wind whipped away half of what they said to each other. Others congregated to chime in or smirk. Our masked biker friend stood literally breathing down Prisha’s neck with a sign saying “SHE DOESN’T EVEN GO HERE.” Amazingly, she remained calm and focused. I started recording just as she was answering questions about a Twitter Space where she had discussed policy strategy with some concerned Midwestern lawmakers. Trans media was all abuzz with outrage over MI state rep Josh Schriver’s comment that banning cross-gender treatment for adults was the “endgame.” My video begins with Prisha in the middle of explaining that dissenting lawmakers were invited to join the Space and share their opinions, but curiously, no one did. And from here, her interlocutor goes topic-hopping, working together with another man on estrogen to try to knock her off balance with accusations of “misinformation.” On both videos, you can hear some spicy counter-jabs from Eli, who lacked Prisha’s saintly patience and was getting more pissed off by the minute.
The second man was in his 30s, overweight, taking occasional pulls on a weed vape under dark glasses. His mouth twisted into a little grimacing “O” as he exhaled. He wore an aquamarine dress covered in sea turtles. No, he said, of course he wasn’t fast-tracked through his “treatment” without informed consent, because no one is (even though he dismissed Prisha’s own story as an isolated case of someone who had “rushed into shit”). “I struggled with this for years for over a fucking decade before I came out,” he says near the 7-minute mark in my first clip, “And then I got pills because I’d been struggling with it for a decade and wanted to kill myself at the point I decided to finally fucking transition.” Here his voice started to crack a little. “And guess what? Transitioning saved my fucking life, because I was ready to kill myself, and then I said fuck it, I don’t care if people hate me because I’m trans. I’m gonna be trans and be myself. And guess what? All of a sudden, all those thoughts of wanting to kill myself, when I transitioned into a woman, those went away.”
Very calmly, Prisha said she understood him very well, because “I have been on the other side of this, and I really bought into the ‘hate’ stuff. Whether you believe it or not, personally I just want to say that I don’t hate you, or any of you. So take that as you will.” Here the girl in the orange hat shrugged and smirked.
Segment #1 (full Twitter analysis here)
The original questioner spent much of my second clip insisting that he didn’t need Prisha or anyone else to “validate” his experience, even though he seemed very concerned to extract her agreement that he “stood before her completely sound in mind and body.” “Do you believe trans people are real,” he pressed, “or that they’re mentally ill?”
“Hard to tell at this point!” said Eli.
By the end, you could tell they were running out of anything that might pass for an argument, deciding instead to mock Prisha for “begging on Twitter,” then for coming to Lansing, then for having bad signs. Yet somehow, they just couldn’t leave us and our bad signs alone.
Segment #2 (full Twitter analysis here)
We didn’t take a lunch break proper, though Prisha munched on goldfish crackers from Katie. Meanwhile, I looked over and noticed the trans cookies had been joined by trans pizza. Pro-lifers came and went. Sometimes they crossed the street, but they couldn’t even be left alone there. One very pretty, feminine-looking blonde girl in overalls dashed across to dance around an elderly man. At least, I assumed she was a girl. A boy would have needed to take puberty blockers to pass so well. Her sign said “Why You Protesting QDOBA?” (since this was the business closest to the zone he’d picked). Jeremy danced a little with them too, not really understanding but figuring he might as well.
Our original plan was to stay until the clinic closed at 4. But Prisha was getting weaker, and the wind was getting stronger. Somewhere in the middle of the afternoon, we all sort of looked at each other and made an executive decision. But I felt bad about leaving Jeremy. At one point, he pointed to a tiny trans flag in the pretty blonde girl’s hand. “I’m a little behind, but what’s that flag?” She laughed at him. I explained it, containing myself. “These guys aren’t your friends,” I said. “They came here to bully Prisha.”
“Oh no,” the girl said, making her face a mask of patient gentleness. Such a lovely face, so expressive. “That’s not it at all! We’re very sorry about what happened to her. We just don’t think she should try to stop anyone else from getting health care.” For Prisha to talk about her own experience would be one thing, she explained, but coming all the way out just to protest a clinic that’s helping people? She tilted her head. “That ain’t the look, sweetie.”
I was too tired to muster a suitably withering riposte, and coming up behind me was Prisha, just back from a bathroom break and very ready to leave. It was time. We took some farewell pictures and called it a day.
But later, sitting with Prisha and Eli at the Creole Burger Bar and Kitchen, I still thought of Jeremy, and I could only cry.
“It’s okay,” Prisha said gently. “I cry every single day.”
A couple of weeks ago we saw a group staging a vigil outside a huge government building labeled "Consolidated Forensic Laboratory" opposite our hotel in DC. It was hard to tell from their few signs what it was about, plus it was dusk. We assumed they were leftwing but this lot was quiet and we strained to hear what a speaker was saying. Likely this was a regular fixture because a lot of security guards we didn't see the next day were out in force. When I googled "Consolidated Forensic Laboratory" it turned out that the body parts of preemie-sized babies found by activists in the garbage outside a DC abortion clinic were taken there; now the Biden administration has ordered their incineration without autopsy to determine whether the law was broken. https://www.lifenews.com/2024/02/07/joe-bidens-doj-is-trying-to-cover-up-potentially-illegal-abortions-that-killed-5-full-term-babies/
Protesting the destruction of innocent lives - even quietly - is stressful, time-consuming and costly. I salute you for being there, as well as the old timers like the 40 Days for Life crowd. Faithful Catholics by their persistent and public refusal to look the other way have left evangelicals in the dust on this issue. Let us never forget and never rest until the most defenseless among us are protected - including vulnerable victims of the trans cult.
I thought the slogans on your sign were pretty good, but somehow later in the day the best slogan for the movement to combat trans insanity popped into my head:
"It's not your motivation, it's your information".
When they ask you what your slogan means, you tell them (or give them a data sheet to explain) that we totally agree your motivation is right. You want to protect trans kids, help them fit in, keep them from suicide and from abuse by parents, etc.
We (trans skeptics) agree that these are all good motivations.
But what we're trying to tell you is that the information you are working from is wrong, and that in the effort to protect the well-being of these kids you are doing them grievous harm.
We ask you just to weigh the data, and base your decision solely on that.
I actually wrote a long and detailed comment outlining how to use this as a coherent strategy nationally, all trans skeptics repeating the same, because we need to force people to examine our data. But it wouldn't post so I decided maybe it wasn't God's will or you were not the person to put this burden on (and the latter is likely).
But I decided to put this thought here.
Anyway it's vitally important not to engage culture war topics so much they bring you down, so please do what seems right to you. Be that work, exploring, music, whatever. I don't know enough to run the universe.