Paving the Way: Judges, Children, and Gender

The courts could make the call.

Could the state take a child away from a parent who does not want the child to receive cross-sex hormones and amputation of healthy body parts? An Ohio court has told us the answer: yes.

When transgender identity is treated as a non-elective medical procedure, that’s where the child welfare and legal systems inevitably lead.

From CNN.com, February 16, 2018, “Judge gives grandparents custody of Ohio transgender teen”:

A Hamilton County, Ohio, judge on Friday gave custody of a transgender teen to his grandparents rather than his parents, allowing them to make medical decisions regarding his transition.

The parents didn’t want the teen, a 17-year-old who identifies as male, to undergo hormone treatment and refused to call him by his chosen name, triggering suicidal feelings, according to court testimony. The parents wanted custody in order to make medical decisions for the teen and prohibit the treatment that his medical team had recommended.

…A team at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, where the teen has been treated since 2016, advised the court that he should start treatment as soon as possible to decrease his suicide risk.

The parents’ attorney had argued that the child was not “even close to being able to make such a life-altering decision at this time.” A county prosecuting attorney argued that the parents wanted to stop the treatment because it violated their religious beliefs.

In the custody decision, Hendon said the parents will have visitation rights and are “encouraged to work toward a reintegration of the child into the extended family.”…

Reintegration, that is, if parents drop their beliefs, grounded in both religion and biology, that their child doesn’t need to be surgically and chemically altered – and in fact could be harmed by such interventions.

The Ohio judge has advice for lawmakers. From the CNN report:

She also encouraged Ohio lawmakers to create legislation giving judges a framework in which they can evaluate a patient’s right to gender therapy. ‘What is clear from the testimony presented in this case and the increasing worldwide interest in transgender care is that there is certainly a reasonable expectation that circumstances similar to the one at bar are likely to repeat themselves,’ she wrote. ‘That type of legislation would give a voice and a pathway to youth similarly situated as (the teen) without attributing fault to the parents and involving them in protracted litigation which can and does destroy a family unit.’”

A patient’s “right to gender therapy” isn’t exactly what’s at stake here. We know that, from the attempted passage of talk-therapy bans in New Hampshire and in other states. If New Hampshire’s bill passes, a licensed therapist who is working with a minor experiencing unwanted same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria might say something that the minor or his parent interpret as being less than supportive of the attraction or dysphoria. In that case, the therapist could lose professional licensure.

No, the “right” the judge is talking about – and the right that the therapy ban promoters are talking about – is the right for children and adolescents to have “gender reassignment,” even if that means publicly-funded surgery and hormonal treatment given against the will of the parents.

In the Granite State, Health and Human Services bureaucrats in July 2017 began treating sex-change procedures as a covered service under Medicaid, including for minors. The agenda-driven bureaucrats did so before any public hearing. They put taxpayers on the hook for sex-change surgery and drugs.

New Hampshire families relying on Medicaid came forward to a legislative oversight committee, asking why treatments for their own children’s chronic conditions aren’t covered in full while sex changes are covered. The members of the legislative oversight committee commented that they weren’t involved in policy, and the committee let the HHS bureaucrats’ agenda go forward.

You can bet your life that the bureaucrats were fully involved in policy.

Now, legislators are getting into the act with bans on talk therapy for minors experiencing unwanted sexual attraction or gender dysphoria. The goal: prevent any licensed New Hampshire therapist from implying that rejection of a child’s own biological sex might not be a good idea. If it takes banning speech to get the job done, biology-deniers will be happy to pass the necessary law.

Who else comes in contact with children and is licensed by the state? Teachers. Once a talk therapy ban is in place for licensed therapists, speech regulation for teachers is not a stretch. Telling a gender-confused six-year-old boy “I like you exactly as you are” could be interpreted by a parent as unsupportive of the boy’s desire to be treated as a girl.

Do we really want to go there?

We’re already going there. Every time there’s a therapy ban hearing or vote and you’re not lining the State House hallways to say no, every time an elected official treats “gender reassignment” as essential medical care, every time a Governor is silent when a state bureaucrat uses your money to pay for sex changes, we’re normalizing hormonal manipulation and the amputation of healthy body parts for children. We’re paving the way for judges like the one in Ohio.

 

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