DAILY WIRE
An LGBT activist teacher in Colorado and her trans-identifying male husband are housing a 17-year-old girl who identifies as a boy. Police say they are unable to intervene to bring the teen home to her mother.
JoAnn Smotherman, a former math teacher at Durango High School, took the teen, one of her students, into her Durango home in December when the girl left home after a fight with her mother. JoAnn is married to Vivian Smotherman, a trans-identifying man who ran for Colorado State Senate as a Democrat last year.
The teen’s mother, Cynthia Stein, has gone to the Smothermans’ home and attempted, unsuccessfully, to take back her daughter. She called in the police, but the officers who responded to the scene said they would not force the teen to go home, according to the police report and body cam footage of the incident obtained by The Daily Wire.
The situation is the culmination of months of outside influences on the vulnerable teen, her mother told The Daily Wire.
The 17-year-old girl has identified as a boy since the fall and now uses a unisex name. She has been diagnosed with autism, ADHD, an eating disorder, depression, and anxiety, according to medical records provided by her mother. At school, the teen was seeing a counselor, without her mother’s knowledge, who advised the girl to terminate parental notification and encouraged her to participate in LGBT support groups, her mother said.
The turn to radical gender ideology came amid difficult times at home. Stein underwent treatment for an aggressive cancer in 2023, and believes that crisis deeply affected her daughter, who became “very withdrawn” from the family.
“Smotherman stepped in and took advantage of my kid,” Stein told The Daily Wire. “She’s just inserted herself into my family, and I still can’t get her out.”