Identity Project

Maria Keffler, MSEd

Co-Founder, Advocates Protecting Children

Maria Keffler is a Co-founder of Advocates Protecting Children and the Arlington Parent Coalition in Virginia. An author, speaker, and teacher with a background in educational psychology, Maria has fought to support families and protect children from unethical activism and dangerous policies around sexuality and transgender ideology since 2018.  She is the author of multiple books, including Desist, Detrans & Detox: Getting Your Child Out of the Gender Cult.  Maria and her husband have three children and live in Virginia.

Maria Keffler's Recommended Resources

Advocates Protecting Children

Advocates Protecting Children (APC) is an organization led by moms and teachers that is dedicated to fighting the gender industry, and especially its predation on children in the form of unethical social and medical transition for the sake of political and financial profit. APC serves and supports churches, schools, organizations, families, and individuals who seek facts and guidance on responding to gender ideology and activism.

Commonsense Care: Parenting Gender-Confused Kids with Truth & Love - Advocates Protecting Children (Podcast)

This podcast is designed to show parents of gender dysphoric kids another way that steers clear of chemical and surgical interventions.

God Created Them Male & Female: Children's Ministry Curriculum

Advocates Protecting Children has created this K-5 curriculum for use by children’s ministry programs within faith-based organizations. The curriculum focuses on teaching three things: (1) God created people only as males and females. (2) Some people don’t understand this, and may say that your parents, the church, and the Bible are wrong. (3) God made you exactly the way you are.

Desist, Detrans & Detox: Getting Your Child Out of the Gender Cult

Blindsided when a child suddenly announces a transgender identity, many parents today find their families under assault by an insidious predator: the billion-dollar gender industry. Do you want a live son (daughter) or a dead daughter (son)? Nearly every parent whose child has fallen into the gender industry's clutches has heard the same emotionally manipulative threat: agree to your child's immediate social and medical transition, or prepare for the child's suicide. Schools, healthcare providers, politicians, and an aggressive activism machine are coercing people and especially children down a destructive path of medicalization in the name of transgender medicine. Caught in the maelstrom of gender identity politics, medical experimentation, and a cultural zeitgeist that paints the family as an oppressor, parents are lied to from every quarter, and told they must consent to their children's gender transition and medicalization. But there is a different and saner path. A growing cadre of parents are saying, "No," to the gender machine's unethical and deceptive narrative. Based on sound principles of psychology and child development, as well as on strategies used by parents who have pulled their children back from the gender cult's destructive ideology, Desist, Detrans, & Detox: Getting Your Child Out of the Gender Cult provides a roadmap to help families navigate the treacherous terrain of gender indoctrination, and bring their children back to reality and safety.

Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2021 BY THE TIMES AND THE SUNDAY TIMES

Until just a few years ago, gender dysphoria—severe discomfort in one’s biological sex—was vanishingly rare. It was typically found in less than .01 percent of the population, emerged in early childhood, and afflicted males almost exclusively.

But today whole groups of female friends in colleges, high schools, and even middle schools across the country are coming out as "transgender." These are girls who had never experienced any discomfort in their biological sex until they heard a coming-out story from a speaker at a school assembly or discovered the internet community of trans "influencers."

Unsuspecting parents are awakening to find their daughters in thrall to hip trans YouTube stars and "gender-affirming" educators and therapists who push life-changing interventions on young girls—including medically unnecessary double mastectomies and puberty blockers that can cause permanent infertility.

Abigail Shrier, a writer for the Wall Street Journal, has dug deep into the trans epidemic, talking to the girls, their agonized parents, and the counselors and doctors who enable gender transitions, as well as to "detransitioners"—young women who bitterly regret what they have done to themselves.

Coming out as transgender immediately boosts these girls’ social status, Shrier finds, but once they take the first steps of transition, it is not easy to walk back. She offers urgently needed advice about how parents can protect their daughters.

A generation of girls is at risk. Abigail Shrier’s essential book will help you understand what the trans craze is and how you can inoculate your child against it—or how to retrieve her from this dangerous path.