'Because They Can!'
Our story in a great questionnaire
1. If you can take a moment to introduce yourself (keep short - give your name "Ellie", moved from Ukraine to Massachusetts in (year) for work. Went back to Kiev to deliver my first child, my daughter in (year). Moved to California (year)
My daughter was taken by Child Protection Services in (year) because we would not affirm her chosen gender.
We are a legal Ukrainian immigrant family that came to the United States in search of a safe and happy ‘brighter future’ after having lived under the USSR communism and socialism for 70 years experience. Came in 2007 on working visas, landed in Massachusetts and started building our new family. For financial reasons, our daughter was born in Kiev, then we returned to Boston area, we received a green card, bought a home and she went to school. She went through bullying by children and teachers and we left the state because she started to go out of control, with the school mafia playing along. I took my two children by then and we took a family trip that coincided with the COVID eruption and we stayed till the borders reopened and we reunified with their father and went to Bay area where he found a remote job.
2. Can you tell us what happened - a brief timeline that led up to CPS taking your child?
Tell story of daughter's time in school in Massachusetts, her being more overactive than other children, bullied, struggling to fit in. Moved to California (year) because..
It is not a one year story but in short, she was never a tomboy, rather a vivacious happy but very hyperactive girl, that appeared to be an inconvenient child for her teachers. Children bullied her and that went unaddressed by her school administration. This story encompasses a lot of legal battle for her from 2017-2020 that even resulted in a lawsuit. But we had left the state not wanting to risk it anymore.
3. What support did the school offer to your daughter - and you as parents? None.
4. What happened next?
Talk about how the grooming started - her visits to the doctor, prescribing medication etc , how she cut hair off and thought she wanted to be a boy and take hormones.
We stayed in Bay area for under a year, and since the rent was very expensive, we started looking for options and saw a wonderful home on Zillow in Redding CA Shasta county. We moved in just weeks before the Fawn fire in 2021. She then started looking into why she had been bullied, what went wrong and how she can move on. Redding is a very rough place to find offline friendship in -and we tried hard - and so she opted for an online chat app Discord. She seemed to be doing better after the Ukraine trip and living in Bay area. She dug into psychology, got tested for ADHD, ODD, BPD, PTSD, MDD. Then 2022 the Ukrainian war started and our family began to get immediately engage in helping our country. Within that time, she was craving for friends and help with her negativity, aggression and severe mood swings as result of the bullying related traumas. She found a lithium product Lithobed online and asked to be prescribed it ‘seeing how you guys are suffering from my negativity and mood changes’. We went to Mercy Family Center and during her regular well child visit, we learned about their new psychiatrist Dr Sager that was ‘awesome’. We saw her for two appointments in Mercy and then she self-referred to the Children’s Legacy Center for Resilience and within 2023 she groomed our daughter into trans ideology, stuffing her and myself with heavy psychotropic medications. In the same month when our daughter started seeing Sager, she coincidentally? landed on a Discord LGBTQ+ server where she was ‘warmly received’ and where she met a markymoo. Started playing Minecradt, Roblox and long hour VCs with him. Her haircuts became shorter, she switched to male wardrobe entirely and using male public bathrooms .
5. When did she present with gender confusion? What caused this? Tell us about this confusion - what did it look like? Signs early on?
There were NEVER any signs of gender confusion. She was not a girlie girl but she was not a tomboy either. Her bullying traumas, outside influence and her school indoctrination did their job. After or around the time share started talking to Dr. Sager, she came out with a unisex name and asked to have it changed legally. She started serious transgender talks in 2024, the year when CA Shasta CPS took her. She asked me and dad in separate conversations to sign a testosterone consent. We declined and Sager called CPS on May 29 2024.
6. Did you affirm her gender - her wanting to be a boy? What did you do?
We accommodated to her her unisex name knowing her mental health issues, I shopped in male departments and I brought her a chest binders occasionally she paid for. We had to censor our language since we fundamentally speak our native tongues-Russian and Ukrainian with our kids and those are known to be highly gendered languages but we did that. I even stopped using past tenses or had to play with my Russian using nouns mostly since ‘Did you have you breakfast? ‘ must be said using personal verbal endings. This turned into a nightmare.
7. What happened when you wouldn't affirm that her new chosen gender?
Talk about CPS coming to the door, you called police etc
Her severe estrangement became obvious in the May when she demanded the hormonal therapy consent: she would start an LGBTIQ topic, and upon receiving an unfavorable response, would shut down and isolate for a few days without talking to us, she would swear, correct our language and bully her little brother to make him call her a he. She would force me to talk to Sager for ‘she has been able to convince many families!’ Seeing our resistance, she apparently told Sager and the CLC made a call to Shasta county HHS Children’s services. On Jun 3 2024, a stranger in black with no car visible around producing no badger ID no court paperwork accompanied by no LE officer came and with no prior calls or investigation snatched our daughter. At all times, she was attempting to provoke physical aggression but failed. When dad had her finally call 911, 8 cop cars came.
8. What specific actions or words did CPS say made you an unfit parent?
9. What have you done to challenge this? Talk about court, money spent
We had 3 attorneys that we spent over $ 180 K and still they betrayed, set us up and we had to fire them. We spent $300K of our private family insurance on a SouthCal rehab facility to have her moved from a detrimental glitter foster caregivers that that roomed her with their biological son, underfed her, never provided her with matching living conditions and at whose ‘care’ she, then 15 year old virgin started to be prescribed combined birth control pills, had to take a pregnancy test and an urgent care visit to a female sexual health clinic to say the least… The dependency judge Bigelow removed all non existent allegations of emotional abuse on Feb 3 2025 but never returned our daughter to us, we were marked as abusers and added to a abuse registry index CACI preventing us to work with children, give birth to more children which we want and have very little time left for and pass a security clearance test if needed for a job interview…We were forced out of both the county and the state, the local government in Shasta has bullied, harassed us preventing to sell or rent our home we had to leave for safety reasons and our children’s schools started sending us threats..
10. If you could sit across from the judge or caseworker today, what would you say?
They lost this chance after the BNI SouthCal facility when for our money, they forced the care team to immediately block the entire communication both with our daughter and themselves, allowing the harmful glitter caregiver Maggie to speak and continue indoctrinating and alienating our daughter to testify against us which she did.. Our insurance spent $5000 daily (!) for the facility they eventually kicked her our from no matter how hard we tried to keep her a little longer to heal…
The only place we want to sit in front of the Shasta CPS, their corrupt attorneys and the judge is jail with them serving their sentences for what they have done not only to us but to the rest of the families that are uniting with us.
11. If you could speak directly to other parents, who are facing similar conflicts with their children, what would you want them to hear from your experience?
Know your rights! Be actively involved in your children’s lives, school and health. We did all of that but we made a mistake by trusting them. Do NOT trust any teacher, principal or medical professional.
11. What would you say to your daughter?
You went with them. Yes, we do feel betrayed. You called us biological parents and by our last names and not a ‘safe space’ to return. We are bleeding hearing them. Your little brother had to flee from his homes so many times for your safety not now for his safety as well from the Redding house he loved dearly. But you are part of us and we love you. Come back. Without them.
12. How can the public help you?
Share our story! Talk about us. Reach out to feds like FBI, DOJ and RFK’s agency. This required a strong investigation to be launched. We need a civil rights attorney to join our pro se complaint we filed Dec 2025. We need big media to start covering it.