It started with Kooth, a UK-based phone app marketed as a “free, safe and anonymous online mental wellbeing community” for young people. In 2022, the Pennsylvania state Department of Human Services funded a $3 million grant to Kooth to pilot the app in 30 school districts throughout the state for children in the 6th to 12th grades. The goal was to replace in-person therapy with coaching and counseling through a phone app. For more detail, watch Jamie Walsh’s documentary on Youtube.

None of these coaches or counselors were licensed, though. And the “support” they offered seemed to come with a hidden agenda: No parental consent was required to use the service, and one of the stated objectives was to address gender identity issues. Children who enrolled were required on signup to complete a checkbox indicating which of the following groups they identified with: male, female, agender, or genderfluid. Then they were offered gender identity articles written by Kooth team members and invited to participate in “gender identity circles” where they could share their experiences and enter private chat rooms with the coaches. Kooth appeared to be acting not as a true mental health service but rather as an online grooming forum hosted by the public school system, funded by taxpayer money.

California has now signed a contract with Kooth. Perhaps due to the backlash by parents in Pennsylvania, the company is called Soluna locally. It receives funding from the California Department of Health Services for children age 13 and up. California has a dismal record of respecting parental notification on transgender issues in schools, and California is now an official sanctuary state for transgender youth, after Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law Senate Bill 107 on January 1, 2023. So there are very few existing protections parents can rely on to shield their children from predation by the transgender movement. Worse, unlike in Pennsylvania, where Kooth app use was restricted to the public school system, Soluna is being offered to any children age 13 or older through the CalHOPE program.

Younger children in California aren’t safe, either. In concert with Soluna, the BrightLife Kids program goes after the little ones by offering “behavioral health coaching for parents, caregivers, and kids 0–12.” This program is funded by Newsom’s $4.7 billion Child and Youth behavioral Health Initiative. For children as young as six, BrightLife provides “BIPOC and LGBTQ+ identity-focused coaching programs,” because “you can’t address emotions and behavior without addressing identity.” Not surprisingly, the coaches have experience “working with LGBTQ+, BIPOC, and gender-diverse populations.”

The transgender activist movement has learned that when parents become aware their children are being targeted for grooming and abuse, they revolt. It has now found a way to reach children surreptitiously, through a cell phone, without the parents ever knowing about it. In fact, these same parents are sponsoring the indoctrination of their children through their tax dollars funneled to private companies by way of state mental health services departments. This new development is a particularly insidious and dangerous new inroad to capture children and groom them for transgender conversions, first socially and then medically.

The only way to stop this scourge is to expose it, so that taxpayers and parents demand that government immediately end its sponsorship of any transgender-driven organization that targets children. Everyone should be outraged by this and hold their elected representatives accountable.