Stephanie Winn, a licensed marriage and family therapist based in Portland, Oregon, is utilizing satire to cast a critical light on the arguments pushed by transgender activists in favor of medical gender transitions for minors.

Her clever meme series centers on the hypothetical plight of “Bird Kids,” children who believe they are birds, using this fictive construct to highlight the contentious discussions surrounding medical treatments for gender-dysphoric youth, parental rights, and mental health.

Winn’s online campaign has attracted a large audience, reaching hundreds of thousands of viewers and even catching the eye of well-known figures such as Jordan Peterson and Elon Musk.

The first meme features a young child adorned with cardboard wings, with the accompanying text: “Cardboard wings are wings. Let bird kids fly.” The hashtags #CardboardWingsAreWings, #LetBirdKidsFly, and #ProtectBirdKids add a tongue-in-cheek flair to her message.

Discussing her memes, Winn told Fox News, “This idea that we should give in to a child’s imagination and affirm their delusions and then empower them to do dangerous things — my aim is to poke holes in that.” She continued, “Of course, it’s ridiculous to suggest that cardboard wings are real wings and that the proper thing to do is let children fly with those wings.”

Winn’s criticism comes at a time when gender reassignment surgeries in the U.S. have surged, nearly tripling between 2016 and 2019, as reported in an August study by JAMA Network Open. Alarmingly, almost 8% of the 48,000 patients in the study were between 12 and 18 years old.

Cam Van Fossen, executive director of the trans-inclusion organization Gender Spectrum, counters, “Transgender children exist and are valid in their identities. They are not in a phase, it’s who they are.”

Van Fossen argues that labeling transgender children as delusional can “have negative and even deadly impacts” on their long-term mental health.

But Winn contends that the issue isn’t children’s imagination or adolescents exploring their identities; rather, it’s how adults are approaching these situations.

She says that her memes aim to spotlight the dangers of adults enabling children in making life-altering, potentially perilous decisions.

While the debate over medical interventions like puberty blockers and surgeries for minors is a hot-button issue, advocates assert these treatments are lifesaving due to higher rates of depression and suicide among untreated trans youth.

Winn, however, challenges this narrative. She created another meme featuring a graveyard with the text, “Bird kids murdered by bigotry. They didn’t die because they flew. They died because you tried to stop them.”

Winn questions the common claim that the high suicide risk among trans individuals stems largely from societal discrimination. “Trans rights activists will say it’s all because you didn’t affirm them, it’s all because they were so oppressed and unsupported,” Winn said. “But we have no evidence for that claim.”

She argues that cautioning against potentially harmful decisions is not an act of bigotry but one of care. “To me, that just makes it very clear that all of us who are trying to say, ‘Don’t jump off the roof! Cardboard wings are not real wings,’ that’s not coming from a place of hate, it’s coming from a place of care,” Winn added.

This debate extends into the realm of parental rights as well. Recently, California legislators approved a bill that would require judges to consider whether a parent “affirms” a child’s “gender identity or gender expression” when deciding custody cases.

Moreover, a federal court in Maryland ruled against parents seeking to challenge a school policy that kept them in the dark about their children identifying as transgender or gender-nonconforming.

In another biting meme, Winn wrote, “It is a privilege, not a right to know if your child wears cardboard wings at school,” over an image of two children prepared to jump off a roof with cardboard wings strapped to their backs.

For Winn, the politicization of parental rights is deeply regrettable. “I don’t think that the idea of a parent’s right to protect their child should be a politically polarizing issue,” she said.

Winn’s satirical campaign brings to light significant questions surrounding the role of adults in children’s life choices, especially as society grapples with highly charged and consequential issues involving medical ethics, parental rights, and mental health.