Join host Priscilla Rahn in a riveting episode of Restoring Education in America, as she sits down with Dr. Nikki Johnson, a pioneering pediatrician turned advocate. Together, they delve into the pressing issues surrounding modern education and healthcare. Discover the mission of Excalibur Classical Academy, and explore why many parents are transitioning their kids from public schools. Dr. Johnson shares her transformative journey from saving lives in critical care to taking a stand against conventional practices affecting children’s health and development.
Welcome to Restoring Education in America with Priscilla Rahn. She’s a master educator and author leading the conversation to restore the American mind through wisdom, virtue, and truth.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, hello, everybody. Welcome to Restoring Education in America. I’m your host, Priscilla Rahn, and I’m so excited that you decided to join the conversation today. You know, it’s open enrollment time and parents are looking for great options for their children. One of those great options is a new private classical school that’s opening in the Centennial, Colorado area. It’s called Excalibur Classical Academy, and their mission and vision is restoring America’s heritage by developing servant leaders who are keepers and defenders of the principles of freedom for which our founding fathers pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor. So if you have a young child that’s starting kindergarten through third grade this fall and you would like to learn more or even get a tour of the school, please go to their website, ExcaliburClassicalAcademy.org to sign up for a tour. And also, if you are a teacher who’s interested in teaching in a private classical school, you can submit your resume on their website as well. Well, folks, there’s a reason why so many parents are pulling their kids out of public schools. We’ve seen bad legislation. We’ve seen teachers keeping secrets from parents, students being transitioned without the knowledge and approval of their parents. And so we’re going to talk about it. And I have a very special guest that I am going to bring to the stage who understands this problem from a medical perspective. Welcome, Dr. Nikki Johnson. Thank you. Thank you for having me, Priscilla. It is so good to see you. I am really looking forward to getting into this conversation today with you. But before we get into the conversation, I’m going to share a little bit of your bio with our listeners. Dr. Nikki Johnson is a pediatrician, certified life coach and mother who works as a parent coach, educator and health policy consultant. As a board-certified pediatric critical care doctor, she saved numerous children’s lives. Through her work as an affirming reality parenting coach with Ms. Gabrielle Clark, she continues working to save children’s lives by helping parents guide them away from the clutches of the trans cult toward healthy adulthood. Wow, that is a big weight that you have on your shoulders, Dr. Nikki. So share a little bit about the beginning of your journey to becoming a doctor.
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, sure. Okay. I first was interested in becoming a doctor. I had a sister who has since passed with sickle cell disease. And she remembers this. I don’t remember this, but she remembers me telling her that when I grow up, I’m going to become a doctor and find a cure for sickle cell disease. So apparently I said that to her really many, many years ago. But when I got to medical undergrad and decided I wanted to do medical school, I just felt like it really was a calling for me to actually take care of people. I thought initially I wanted to start a family practice and take care of people in my community, but I fell in love with intensive care and pediatric and internal medicine. So adult medicine and pediatrics, that’s where I did my training, but I ended up specialing in pediatric intensive care, which I could have when I, so I could have the best of both worlds. did that for quite a few years and then started having my own family and COVID hit and my daughters needed me more. So I also dabbled in health policy beginning around 2016, 2017. I started talking about all the issues that were problematic in healthcare, taking care of patients, not being able to take care of patients the way that we want it to, all of the stuff that everybody complains about, high costs, who controls it, who’s in the exam room who shouldn’t be in there, prior authorizations, all of these things. So I started, I got with some people online and began doing some health policy work. and was a co-author for two white papers for the organization, nonprofit organization, Frida Care, which is a grassroots organization made up of about 3 million. I’m probably botching the numbers right now, but it was a ton of people. It was physicians who were practicing plus patients and patient groups. in multiple groups. We got together and wrote really a whole roadmap to transform America’s healthcare and started lobbying. Our congressman got to speak about it at the Library of Congress. Ben Carson was there. This was during President Trump’s first term. So I really got my feet wet with that. And I just became a lot more jaded with everything. Then COVID hit, policies hit, it hit my home. My daughters really were struggling with being at home, being isolated away from friends. It really, really changed things. So I started backing away. I started speaking a lot more about COVID policies. became a part of the group Urgency of Normal. We wrote a toolkit to get schools open, get kids masks off of kids, and to not require the vaccine mandates for kids. And that started getting me in trouble.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, let’s talk about that because you’ve been very active and digging into these really controversial issues that are important to parents and that have been negatively impacting children. So you’ve spent many years as a pediatric critical care physician caring for children in their most fragile moments, Dr. Johnson. How did those experience shape the way that you think about child family and responsibility of adults and parents? But then how did that transition you into the work you’re doing now with Affirming Reality?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, great, great, great question. So what I ended up doing, I became a very niche, I took a very niche position. I was a medical director for pediatric procedural sedation. So it’s a fancy term for anesthesia, but outside of the operating room. So kids and families would come to me with kids who were either extremely anxious or had a painful procedure or something that they needed to hold still for that they were not able to hold still for, like an MRI or some sort of… invasive type of procedure. And I would sedate those kids, get them asleep. And a lot of my patients were kids with, obviously kids with some chronic medical history, but a lot of kids with developmental disorders, autism, and a lot of neurocognitive delays, that kind of thing. During COVID, particularly some of our policies were, we weren’t allowing, we were only allowing one parent to come with their kids. And a lot of these kids with autism or any kind of neurocognitive problem need stability and familiarity. And some of them were large size kids who needed more than one person to just help get them into the building and, you know, be able to handle procedures. Procedures required IV placement, medications, things like that. And I just began to speak up about it. And I mean, I always saw myself as a patient advocate, but it just became much more necessary because hospital policies were or they were being very rigid and forgetting really about the kids. I worked in a hospital, a children’s hospital within a large health system. And so often a lot of the policy driven is for the adults and they don’t really think about the kids. going through things. So I had to find myself advocating a lot for them and advocating for my nursing staff. And it just became really problematic for people who were in leadership above me to hear my complaints or things that I was stating. They just didn’t want to deal with it, honestly. I think that’s kind of the biggest part of it. They didn’t want to hear it. And then the vaccine mandate came down for all employees. And it didn’t actually come about until the Biden administration required, made it mandatory in exchange for Medicaid or Medicare reimbursement. And I was very vocal about that. And so they didn’t like that I was speaking about these things publicly. They didn’t like that the policies that I was advocating for for children were against the mainstream hospital policy. And it just became a very difficult place to work in. So I knew that I needed to leave. My husband was extremely supportive about that and basically said, you know, you got to get out of there. You know, it’s killing you. And so that’s what I did. So I left and that wasn’t easy. Because I was a primary breadwinner, going from a physician salaries, particularly critical care, it was pretty substantial to not really doing anything, to not really making anything because I didn’t have a backup plan. There was no easy way for me to just go into private practice and continue doing what I was doing. It really wasn’t possible to do. So, I mean, I would have to hire a full-time staff. You know, it wasn’t doable. So I had to find a way to continue using my voice, continue being a physician, and then still pay the bills for my family. Ended up where I was working for two different nonprofits, doing some writing, really just kind of using my voice, writing, advocating, doing webinars, those types of things. But I I was really feeling strongly about this gender issue. I guess I kind of skipped over that a little bit though. When the American Academy of Pediatrics published their recommendations for treating children with gender dysphoria back in 2018, and it included sexualizing hormones and surgical procedures as an option, my jaw hit the floor. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I never imagined in my entire career that we would be telling children that it’s okay to reject your body. reject your natural sex, reject everything that’s typical and normal and healthy development, and say it’s OK that you can become a different sex, a different gender, if you want to use that term. I couldn’t believe it. And I wasn’t an active member of the American Academy of Pediatrics, and I had already been critical of them because of their political statements on other things. Then, particularly when President Trump was in his first term, they were just speaking about things that didn’t really have anything to do with pediatric medicine. So that kind of really irritated me about them and I realized how political our medical organizations were becoming and not really advocating for patients based on any sound scientific evidence or just common sense, Priscilla.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, good for you for that. So, you know, you’ve got doctors who are advocating and doing these surgeries and prescribing these hormones for young children and cutting off healthy body parts. And there’s doctors like you who are ringing the alarms. Where’s the disconnect from a medical standpoint? Why are you not in favor of these drugs and surgeries? Well, Well, for the first, the first part of it, I don’t think, I don’t think it’s real.
SPEAKER 03 :
I think it’s a lot of made up mumbo jumbo. No child can, no person can change their sex. It’s not real. It’s a lie. It’s all based on lies. I’ve read a lot of the history on how this stuff came about. And most of it, it’s, it’s pretty ideological. And there’s really no, there was never, ever been any science that proves that there’s more than one sex, which translates to gender because males and females have gametes. They are either sperm or eggs. There’s no third gamete at all. And in order for humans to reproduce, the sperm needs to beat the egg and it needs to become viable. There’s absolutely no other way for that to happen. So if we’re going to tell people that they can change that just based on feelings, it’s physically impossible, biologically impossible. I was actually a biology major in college, by the way. So I do have a bachelor’s of science in biology. So I get that part of it. And then. With children, we are telling children that they can change something that is a biological reality. It’s lying to them. It is telling them that going through the natural development process, which does involve a time period where you fantasize about your identity and that could be multiple any any multiple number of things where children go through these phases that’s typically in preschool kind of school age era and it’s area and it’s normal by the time children reach adolescence normal development is accepting of what your biological reality is. You begin to understand that you understand the difference between fantasy and reality and you suppress the fantasy and reality takes over. What we’re doing is allowing children to perpetually live in a state of fantasy and calling it normal. Again, it’s a lie. So all of it’s a lie. It’s psychologically harmful to do that because at some point they will come to reality as they face realistic scenarios in life. They will actually face reality and face people who don’t agree with the way that they think about themselves. Girls who compete with boys on boys’ sports teams will get knocked over. And this is whether or not they are a girl identifying as a boy or there’s a boy identifying as a girl playing on their sports team. They’re going to feel the difference between a male’s body and a male’s development compared to what a woman and a girl’s is. And that reality is going to hit them and it’s going to hit them hard. And on top of that, we also have the danger, the other dangerous elements that go along with this particular ideology online, which is where a lot of the kids are getting groomed into believing this about themselves, believe in taking on this trans identity. There are predators online who are telling them that not only predators, but there’s also other members of the trans cult, which I call it because there is a small group of people who have these beliefs. They have a language that they use. They are trapping you in. You can’t leave unless you, you know, without suffering some sort of penalty. There’s all of the features of a cult are present here. So I don’t use that term lightly or hyperbolically, but those people are there. And the sex trafficking of minors, pedophilia, it’s all associated with this phenomenon. I’ve met recently with a group that monitors sex trafficking and works with law enforcement to help stop some of this. And I’ve learned that young boys… who look like little girls, prepubescent boys who look like little girls or dressed up as little girls are probably the highest priced commodity in the sex trafficking industry right now. Wow. And they are groomed, trafficked, harmed. So there’s the physical harms along with that. There’s also the physical harms along with being socially transitioned. Social transition, for a lot of people don’t understand what that means, is the adoption of the name, adoption of the pronouns, the starting to dress like the opposite sex. That comes along with other harms as well. Even adults will push prosthetics on little girls where they’re putting these, tucking these prosthetic penises in their underpants that can cause pressure sores and ulcers. The binders that girls wear to compress their breasts are typically used medically for people who’ve had some sort of either breast mastectomy or breast surgery or something where they need to compress their breasts. lymphatic vessels. So they don’t have a lot of swelling and edema and pain that’s associated with that. Those are being used on healthy girls’ bodies, suppressing breast development, compressing and restricting breathing muscles. This isn’t benign at all. This isn’t just one of those things that is just a phase. It really is actually harmful to them. So- That’s my concern.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah. Let’s talk about that because it’s literally happening in public schools where teachers are not letting guardians know that they’re doing this and they are giving young girls bandages. I know this for a fact.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 02 :
Why is this dangerous? And what is your message to parents about this phenomenon?
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, as of right now, there’s only one state that makes it illegal to socially transition a child without the parent’s knowledge, and that is the state of Texas. And even then, there is no enforcement mechanism behind that law. There are a number of states that actually encourage this and have school policy disguised in… Inclusive inclusiveness.
SPEAKER 02 :
Colorado is one of those states. It’s one of the most liberal states in the union right now that is protecting this transitioning that’s happening amongst minors. But go ahead.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes. And and California is. And thankfully, we just had a Supreme Court case that was heard and decided upon that makes it illegal for teachers to do this behind the backs of parents. Not only does this take parental authority away regarding medical decisions about their own children away from them, it’s also… separates the child from their family and permanently disconnects them from the people who actually love them. The people who are advocates for those types of policies that keep secrets from the parents say that they’re doing it so that parents don’t harm their children, that they’re in danger. And they’re using sort of 1980s, 1990s information about how parents who didn’t agree with their child’s homosexuality would be abusive and things like that. And I don’t even actually know the statistics around that, how many families were actually physically and emotionally abusive to their children because of their disagreement with their child’s homosexual sexual preference. But they’re using that as the rationale for keeping this secret from parents. When most parents, even though they may not agree with their child becoming or saying that they want to identify as trans, most parents aren’t abusive. They’re loving and supportive and they want to help their child through this difficult emotional period of time that they’re going through. Because that really is what it is. But The other piece of it is now you have adults who are strangers for the most part, because how many teachers really know their students and how many students really know their kids any better than their own parents do? I mean, you know, and now you have these strangers who are speaking about intimate things with children of all ages. without their parents’ consent. That’s unheard of in any other profession that we know of, right?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, Dr. Johnson, so like, let’s get into your company. I know you’re writing a book, Affirming Reality, because we have, you know, I’m looking at the time. I want to make sure that we have… Time to talk about what your company does, but share a little bit more about what Affirming Reality does for parents.
SPEAKER 03 :
Excellent. Thank you. So Affirming Reality is a coaching program. Gavs Clark and I, who you, Gavs Clark, you have had on your show, who founded it. We coach parents whose kids are identifying as trans and we help them get their kids out of the clutches of this cult. How we do that is we just teach them how to tweak their parenting. And really what we do is we look at the primary causes for this, for kids identifying as this, because this is a phenomenon. This is a social contagion. Why it’s there is because not only is there indoctrination or acculturation, it’s spread throughout our country. Every single cultural institution is involved in making children believe that they can be trance, that it’s a possibility. So the acculturation is there. There is the affirmation from adults who tell them it’s okay and their peers who tell them that it’s okay to be this. And then there’s addictions. There’s device addictions and there’s addiction to the lifestyle itself. we tackle all of those three major problems plus individual underlying problems that may go along with it. So we meet with the families, we meet with the parents, we talk to them, get to know them and know their concerns with their child. And then we tailor a parent coaching program to help them show their children reality. And in doing so, their children come to terms with their maladaptive coping behavior that caused them to be trans and thinking they’re trans in the first place. And then eventually they just leave it behind and go on to live life as their natural sex and become responsible, independently thinking, functioning adults. you know, eventually we’ll make, you know, make mistakes like normal kids do. Like the things that we worried about as parents, you know, your kids are going to go off and, you know, we’re not saying all the kids are going to do this, but the normal kid rebellious things, you know, go and hang out with their friends, try to smoke. And like, we don’t necessarily encourage that, but those are making mistakes that aren’t going to be so consequential that it’s going to cause a permanent change in their life, but really seeing the world through the lens of reality. And the parents are doing that without ever talking about the trans issue. And that’s what makes our program unique, is that we tackle this issue from the perspective of parenting And with knowing that those three primary causes are the thing that’s driving the kid towards it. And we tackle each one of them. We do one hour, one-on-one sessions with the parents, the families, and it takes as long as it takes. Some families can get it done in a couple of sessions. Others take a much longer period of time.
SPEAKER 02 :
So for our listeners, Nikki, give your website where parents can find you.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes. So parents can come to us for a free 15-minute consultation by going to affirmingreality.com and then click on consultation. It’ll take you to scheduling. You can schedule at your convenience. And we will do our first consultation. We’ll get you a Zoom link, everything. We’ll do it all over email. Then we’ll decide if you fit our program. And then we get started right away with coaching.
SPEAKER 02 :
And Nikki, when is your book anticipated to come out? Oh gosh, we are hoping to get this book published out in April.
SPEAKER 03 :
In April, okay. Yes, and the book is going to be a coaching manual for parents who can’t or are reluctant to do the coaching with us, but they will be actually able to read and use the methods that we use with our clients. And anybody who’s a little bit confused about it or needs some strategies can still schedule some time to meet with us. And it might even just be a protracted course. That is our hope. Our hope is to just get our message and methodology out to as many parents who need it.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, thank you, Dr. Nikki Johnson from Affirming Reality. She is a medical doctor and really helping a lot of parents. So to my listeners, thank you so much for tuning in and catch me next time. And remember, educating the mind without the heart is no education. So seek wisdom, cultivate virtue, and speak truth.
SPEAKER 01 :
Thanks for tuning in to Restoring Education in America with Priscilla Rahn. Visit PriscillaRahn.com to connect or learn how you can sponsor future episodes to keep this message of faith, freedom, and education on the air.
