The following op-ed was adapted from Wednesday’s opening monologue of the Ari Hoffman Show. Listen weekdays 3-6 PM Pacific on Talk Radio 570 KVI, the KVI app, KVI.com, and your preferred podcast platform.
The lives of Christian children were cut short in Wednesday’s massacre in Minneapolis, their families shattered forever.
But when the candles burn down and the vigils are over, parents are left with another haunting question: how did this happen? The Westman family looked like a normal family. Photos of their son before 2020 show a typical kid, sometimes flamboyant in style, sure, but still a boy. Then you find out his mother, a Catholic woman working at Annunciation Church, actually filed court papers to help him change his name to Robin and adopt she/her pronouns at age 17. How does a Catholic mom end up helping her son become transgender and, years later, a school shooter?
That fear sits heavy in the minds of parents everywhere. And it connects directly to what Abigail Shrier said at the NW Sanity Forum hosted by Future 42 just last week. She explained how it begins, not with some dramatic decision, but with a form. A mental health screening form from a school or pediatrician. On the surface, it looks harmless: questions about sadness, anger, self-harm, and gender identity. But parents never see the results. Those answers are kept secret between the child and the school.
School "mental health forms"
"Kids fill them out at school, surrounded by their peers, hardly the setting for an honest cry for help. Kids who are starving themselves or cutting it don't announce it on a bubble sheet. Kids who are being abused don't write it down" pic.twitter.com/9dXdafGwTU
— Ari Hoffman 🎗 (@thehoffather) August 28, 2025
And here’s the kicker: those forms are not legally required. You can refuse them. The law says schools must get active or passive consent before a child participates. But most parents don’t even realize what they’re agreeing to. Kids fill them out at school, surrounded by peers, hardly the setting for an honest cry for help. As Shrier pointed out, kids who are cutting or starving themselves don’t confess it on a bubble sheet. Kids who are being abused don’t write it down, knowing a counselor will read it.
"You need to know what's going on in school & tell your kids, 'if you are given these (mental health) forms, say no,' because I've seen how detailed these forms are. They give them ideas like cutting yourself. Imagine a middle schooler filling that out who didn't know." pic.twitter.com/djyPi4ZNbK
— Ari Hoffman 🎗 (@thehoffather) August 28, 2025
So what are the forms really for? They become data points, sometimes breached, sometimes shared, feeding schools and state agencies. They justify funding, carve out new victim categories, and fuel political agendas. Worse, they wedge secrecy between parent and child. What should be your family’s conversation becomes your child’s private contract with the state.
That’s why I told my kids: if they hand you a form, skip it. If they press, tell them to call me. Because here’s the fear: what if the school assumes refusal means abuse? What if they call CPS? What if they meet privately with my kid behind my back? And in a trans sanctuary state, what if they help transition her without me ever knowing?
By the time the alleged shooter’s mother may have realized what was happening, maybe a therapist had already hit her with that awful line: “Would you rather have a living daughter or a dead son?” We’ve all heard it. Some parents are supportive from the start. Others are bullied into compliance. But either way, the path starts with a form, or a guidance counselor visit, or a “support program” that seemed harmless at first.
And then Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and the Democrats made this about guns. Fine, let’s talk about guns. Why was someone openly identifying as transgender approved for a gun license? Was he on hormones or psychiatric meds when he applied? Did he lie on the form? If transgenderism is not considered a mental illness, then of course the state waves it through. But maybe that’s the problem.
Two weeks after a transgender shooter killed six at a Christian school in Tennessee in 2023, the head of Minnesota’s Catholic schools begged Tim Walz for help: “Our schools are under attack,” he wrote. Walz did nothing. That same month, Walz signed a bill making Minnesota a “trans refuge.”
Charlie Kirk put it bluntly: if you are mentally unstable enough to try to surgically or hormonally change your sex, you are too unstable to own a firearm.
Which brings us to the bigger issue: the erasure of Gender Identity Disorder from the DSM. Pretending it wasn’t a mental illness was one of the most dangerous mistakes of the last decade. At one point, it was recognized as what it is, a mental health condition. That mattered. Because, as a diagnosis, it created a framework for treatment. Now, rebranded as “gender dysphoria,” the entire system treats it not as a disorder to address but as an identity to affirm.
"This brings me to a bigger problem, the erasure of gender identity disorder from the DSM. That's the Gray's Anatomy of the mind. Pretending gender identity disorder wasn't a mental illness was one of the most dangerous and consequential mistakes of the last decade." pic.twitter.com/mucVSpq48M
— Ari Hoffman 🎗 (@thehoffather) August 28, 2025
That shift has consequences. It affects custody battles, where parents can lose their children for refusing to “affirm.” It affects whether the state can remove kids from their homes. It affects gun licenses and who qualifies as stable enough for ownership. It affects hiring and job security. And most importantly, it affects whether doctors and therapists treat it as an illness in need of healing or as an untouchable identity.
If Gender Identity Disorder were restored to the DSM, we could re-center the conversation on treatment rather than blind affirmation. We could help kids find stability instead of pushing them toward permanent, medicalized harm. We could protect parents who say no, instead of branding them as abusers. We could start addressing this terrible condition as we would any other mental illness, with compassion, science, and the goal of making people whole.
EXCLUSIVE: Secretly recorded call with American Medical Association President, Dr. Bobby Mukkamala, reveals an alarming abdication of responsibility on "gender-affirming care" at the highest level of medicine.
Confronted with 'puberty blocker' side effects, Dr. Bobby evades: pic.twitter.com/PCqHqNpjts
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) August 26, 2025
Meanwhile, new revelations prove just how flimsy the medical establishment’s claims have been. The Daily Wire released a secretly recorded call with American Medical Association President Dr. Bobby Mukkamala. Confronted with the side effects of puberty blockers, he insisted they were “reversible,” a claim completely at odds with medical evidence. He even claimed transgender suicide rates were above 50%. That is false. Not “suicidal thoughts”—completed suicides. JAMA, the AMA’s own journal, shows a completed suicide rate of 75 per 100,000 among trans-identifying people. That’s high, but it’s nowhere near 50%. The head of America’s top medical association was caught pushing lies to defend gender ideology.
So here’s what parents need to remember:
- Those forms are not legally required. You can refuse them.
- When the doctor asks you to leave the exam room, you can say no.
- You have every right to ask your child’s therapist what they will or won’t tell you—including whether they consider transitioning a form of self-harm.
Because once you allow those secrets to sit between your child and a stranger, the law is no longer on your side; it’s on theirs. Politicians say 13-year-olds can make their own medical decisions. Schools don’t have to tell parents if their child has been assaulted. Every home is treated as a suspect home. It’s Schrödinger’s Domestic Abuse: parents guilty until proven innocent.
Parents, don’t surrender that ground. Don’t let a form or a policy decide your child’s future. Your kids don’t belong to the state. And you don’t need to apologize for standing between them and harm.
