Anti-trans agenda is a focal point of Philadelphia Moms for Liberty summit

Inside a conference room at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown on Saturday morning, women held their cell phones in the air, filming a video that began to play in front of them.

“I don’t ever want someone else to feel this way,” said a tearful young woman on the screen, who said she regretted receiving treatment after being told she was transgender. “I feel like no one wants to date me or love me.” Some in the crowd murmured, “No.”

Standing at the front of the room, Chris Elston told the women that “if you teach [children] there’s such a thing as being in the wrong body, they’re going to believe you.”

Elston — who said the video came from Reddit — isn’t a medical or mental health professional. He’s a father known as “Billboard Chris,” who travels the country wearing a billboard that says “Children cannot consent to puberty blockers.”

And he wasn’t speaking at a health conference, but at a summit training candidates to take over school boards.

» READ MORE: Education officials tell Moms for Liberty attendees that schools need to ‘get all this woke stuff out’

The national Moms for Liberty summit being held in Philadelphia this weekend has drawn leading GOP presidential candidates and hundreds of attendees — mostly women — from across the country. Moms for Liberty, which bills itself as a “parental rights” group, says it’s concerned with empowering parents to hold school leaders accountable.

But a major theme of the conference, raised repeatedly by speakers, has been denying transgender identity — in addition to arguing that schools shouldn’t teach about the topic. A 2022 analysis found that 1.6 million people in the United States, including 300,000 youth over the age of 13, identify as transgender.

“No child is born in the wrong body,” said Jaimee Michell, a graphic designer and founder of the group Gays Against Groomers, who addressed the full conference Saturday morning and said that “we will not make peace with an ideology that seeks to sexualize, indoctrinate, and amputate the healthy body parts of children.”

Elston, addressing attendees during a separate breakout session, said that using pronouns that affirm children’s gender identities rather than biological sex is “like a cult. What chance do these children have at getting out of this?”

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican presidential contender who spoke Saturday, drew applause when he said: “I believe that God created two genders.”

LGBTQ advocates said Moms for Liberty was spreading hatred and misinformation.

It’s untrue that there is a simple or clear gender binary for all humans, said Billie Swiggard, a staff physician at the Mazzoni Center, Philadelphia’s largest LGBTQ health agency. Swiggard, who is a transgender woman, also noted that it was “extremely rare” for someone to receive gender-affirming surgery under the age of 18.

“The ‘Moms’ are not medical or educational experts and their statements lead to real harm,” said Chris Bartlett, executive director of the William Way LGBT Community Center in Philadelphia.

The group’s positions and activities — and Moms for Liberty’s recent designation by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an “antigovernment extremist” group — has helped drive opposition to the summit, which began Thursday. Protesters chanted “Philly is a trans city” and displayed Pride flags outside the Museum of the American Revolution, which hosted a reception despite outcry from its staff.

Demonstrations have continued outside the Marriott throughout the weekend. On Saturday, a daylong dance party protest infused with electro beats endured under the summer sun. Rally members danced and blew bubbles into the air as parents and their children drew in rainbow chalk on a portion of Filbert Street in front of the hotel, decorating their own protest signs and capes. Others waved flags and posters in front of stopped cars, and drag performer Danny Delorean read aloud to the crowd of families.

» READ MORE: Moms for Liberty is sharing the Philadelphia Marriott with an international Jewish conference. Some attendees aren’t happy.

Posing for a photo waving a large blue, pink, and white transgender flag in front of the Marriott, Radiance Angelina Petro said she came to rally against anti-trans policies in schools and government and in “support of the queer kids, because they are the future.”

Petro, 55, said she was protesting Moms for Liberty, because “as a trans person, my life depends on it,” citing the elevated suicide rates of trans people compared with the rest of the population — a statistic that advocates emphasize is due to mistreatment and stigmatization in society.

Alicia Oglesby, a school counselor in Philadelphia, attended the protest — organized by the Philly Children’s Movement and the Philly Childcare Collective — with her daughter, Maya, 11.

”There’s no one group that deserves to say that children should not learn about all types of people, so Moms for Liberty has a lot of audacity,” Oglesby said. Maya, who held a sign featuring a quote from James Baldwin, added: “You shouldn’t judge people by what they look like, you should judge people by their personality.”

Some Moms for Liberty attendees pushed back. “We are for the trans community; we are just not for the teaching of gender identity in classrooms,” Tiffany Barbato, the Delaware County chapter chair of Moms for Liberty, told The Inquirer.

Barbato, who said she got involved in Moms for Liberty when her children were required to wear masks while running track, added that the group wasn’t seeking to ban books, but to ensure only “age-appropriate” books were in classrooms.

The group, however, has helped fuel the removal of books from school libraries across the country — including in the Central Bucks School District, where Gender Queer and This Book is Gay were banned in May, and where book challengers drew heavily on a Moms for Liberty-affiliated website that flags explicit passages for parents.

Amy McGahran, a mother of Central Bucks graduates, traveled with others to the Marriott from Doylestown to protest, saying Moms for Liberty has “infiltrated” her district’s school board.

”It’s heartbreaking,” said Kira Kraiman, also a former Central Bucks parent motivated to campaign for change on the board.

Inside the Marriott on Saturday, speakers urged Moms for Liberty members to stay focused on their goals rather than their critics.

“What you guys are slogging through is a cultural revolution,” said James Lindsay, a pundit and author of such books as Race Marxism, who drew parallels to China’s Cultural Revolution and the forced reeducation of teachers.

At one session Saturday, attendees got instruction on probing schools’ use of social emotional learning — an approach aimed at helping students manage their emotions and develop other skills, but that conservatives say is ushering in critical race theory and other topics they believe should be out of bounds of public schools.

Deb Fillman, a homeschool consultant who held a breakout session focused on the topic, likened social-emotional learning to a drug being tested on children.

“We always think medically,” she said, “but a lot of these ideas ... are experimental.”

Swiggard, of the Mazzoni Center, noted that treatment of children and youth for physical gender transitions is done carefully, in consultation with doctors, parents, psychologists and other members of the young person’s care team.

“These decisions are not done casually or without long deliberation,” she said.

Staff writers Punya Bhasin and Rita Giordano contributed to this article.