A parent who completed ASU's gender program compared her child to a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. "I think of it a little like a butterfly," she said in a testimonial featured on the program's own website. "I had a caterpillar and now I have a butterfly."
Her child didn't grow wings. Her child got a diagnosis.
The program is called the Empowerment Lab, run out of Arizona State University and headed by assistant professor Em Matsuno, whose academic specialty is "trans and nonbinary minority stress and resilience." The lab's stated mission is "empowering trans and nonbinary voices in psychology" through what it calls community-based research. Its website — empowermentlab.wordpress.com — lays out the offerings in plain language.
The centerpiece is a Parent Support Program broken into three modules that teach parents what the lab calls "supportive responses" to gender dysphoria. The curriculum instructs parents that gender and sex are separate concepts, that more than two genders exist, and that indigenous "two-spirit" traditions prove gender diversity has always been with us.
That last claim has a problem. Owen Anderson, a conservative philosophy and religious studies professor at ASU, pointed out that the term "two-spirit" was coined in 1990 at a Canadian conference. It's not ancient wisdom. It's a 36-year-old branding exercise dressed up as anthropology.
Anderson raised a sharper concern: an ASU professor is effectively soliciting contact with teenagers regarding "sexual identity and possible trans surgeries." That's his characterization, and nobody from the university has disputed it. ASU Media Relations did not respond to The College Fix's request for comment. Neither did the Empowerment Lab itself.
Silence from a university that will issue a press release about a new recycling bin.
Beyond the parent program, the lab runs a 12-week "LGBTQ-Affirmative Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Training" aimed at mental health providers, students, and trainees. The framing matters — it's not presented as one therapeutic approach among several. It's presented as the correct one. Trainees learn to affirm, not to evaluate. The clinical question of whether a teenager's distress might have causes other than gender identity doesn't appear to be on the syllabus.
Janice Williams, chair of the UK feminist organization OBJECT, characterized transition itself as a "fake solution." That's a position that would get you banned from most university campuses. At ASU, the opposite position gets you a lab and a WordPress site.
Isabel Garcia, an author at Thomas Aquinas College, has written about the philosophical problems with separating sex from gender as a matter of institutional policy. The short version: once you detach the concept from biology, there's no limiting principle. Two genders becomes five becomes sixty-three becomes whatever the patient says it is, and the therapist's job becomes nodding.
Arizona is a state that has actively pushed back against gender ideology in public schools. The legislature has moved to restrict these interventions for minors. And yet the state's flagship university is running a program that coaches parents past exactly those guardrails — teaching them to see affirmation as the only loving response and skepticism as bigotry.
The lab's parent testimonial page doesn't feature any families who went through the program and later had doubts. No detransition stories. No parents who wondered whether three modules at a university were enough preparation for irreversible medical decisions about their child.
Just butterflies.
