Imagine your daughter is confused. Going through puberty can be hard and mixed messages from her classmates and teachers have her convinced that the reason she’s so uncomfortable, the reason she hates her body is that, deep down inside, she is actually a boy.
You then sit her down for a talk, explaining that “gender transitioning” might not be the wisest course. “Just wait this out, it’ll all make sense later in life. Just give it some time,” you tell her.
In the eyes of the state, you just abused your child.
Parents across the country are having their parental rights stripped away simply for not going along with the latest cultural fads.
Jeannette Cooper just encountered this governmental overreach firsthand. Speaking with the Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative non-profit focused on women’s issues, Jeannette explained how her daughter Sophia was taken from her.
Previously, after Jeannette divorced her husband in 2015, she was granted custody of Sophia six days and seven nights a week. As of today, she hasn’t seen or spoken to her daughter in three years.
It all started on July 22, 2019. During a scheduled visit with her father, Sophia came out as transgender. Knowing that her mother, who is a self-described “radical feminist,” wouldn’t affirm her new identity, Sophia claimed she felt “unsafe” with her mother. So, when Jeannette came at 8:30 p.m. to pick up her daughter, the ex-husband refused to comply.
He continued to violate the two’s custody agreement, prompting Jeannette to file an emergency petition. It was then that he claimed that Jeannette’s unwillingness to affirm Sophia’s “awakening awareness of self” made Jeannette’s home “no longer mentally or emotionally safe.”
A Chicago court agreed with the ex-husband’s assessment, granting him “all parenting time” and “all decision-making authority”.
Is gender-affirming care a form of child abuse?
The court took away all visitation rights from Jeannette. The mother, however, was still able to secure her daughter’s safety by negotiating “that Sophia will not medically transition without a court order or Jeannette’s written permission.”
“I missed my daughter’s 13th birthday, her 14th birthday and her 15th birthday. She will be 16 in August,” Jeannette said in a video interview with IWF. “People who are imprisoned have more communication with their child than I do.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymep03QL5-4
“The thing that I clearly am not complying with is this concept that good parenting means that you affirm a child’s idea that there is something wrong with them. I’m not willing to do that,” Jeannette said.
“They want me to have a certain understanding that there is such a thing as a child who is born transgender and this is who they are. I don’t believe that.”
“My child is a girl. I won’t lie to her or anyone else. I think that’s good parenting.”
Jeannette wouldn’t affirm Sophia’s new identity, but her ex-husband would. So, he was granted full custody, and her parental rights were taken away.
This isn’t the first time this has happened, and sadly, it’s likely to happen many more times in the future.
According to a February report from City-Journal, more and more courts are adopting this approach. If two parents are fighting for the custody of a gender-confused child, the parent who affirms the child’s feelings wins out.
“After years of lobbying by gender activists, the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), Tenth Revision, which went into effect in January of this year, eliminated the term ‘gender dysphoria.’ This standard international textbook of disease renames the condition ‘gender incongruence,’ and reclassifies it under ‘sexual health,’” Abigail Shrier, an activist known for speaking out against the gender craze, wrote in City-Journal.
“The psychological symptom — ‘distress’ — no longer appears; according to the most authoritative diagnostic text used by doctors the world over, a once-mental condition is now just a physical one. One might forgive courts for assuming, then, that a physical problem must have a physical solution.
“Courts are adopting this view and seeing a child who has a feeling of gender dysphoria as no different from one born with a cleft palate. From this perspective, the only relevant question in a custody dispute involving a transgender-identified minor is: When will you allow him to get the necessary surgery to fix his body?
“Once a court swallows gender ideology, in other words, judges will believe that the only thing left for a loving parent to do, after an adolescent announces a trans identity, is shuttle him to the doctors who will alter his body and contribute clapping-hands emojis to the photos he posts on Instagram.”
This push within the court system falls in lock-step with the Biden administration and, more broadly, the Democratic Party’s political agenda. President Biden and other Democratic leaders have made it very clear on a number of occasions — gender-affirming care is the only way, and anyone opposed to that view, evidence be damned, is hateful and abusive.
U.S. President Joe Biden signed an executive order aimed at curbing discrimination against transgender youth. The order asks the federal health and education departments to expand access to gender-affirming medical care https://t.co/ELlunu1YxD pic.twitter.com/UKKmDY3VvN
— Reuters Legal (@ReutersLegal) June 16, 2022
As gender theory — the belief that “gender” can somehow be determined by each individual’s discretion, without the need for any evidence to support that claim — becomes more mainstream, courts will increasingly rule in favor of parents that affirm gender identities over those who don’t.
And, in turn, their children will continue to butcher themselves with irreversible surgeries and hormone replacement therapies.
Parents who dare speak out, parents like Jeannette Cooper, will have everything ripped away from them.
