The Christian parents of a teenage girl who was seeking after gender-altering treatment have lost custody of their daughter after disagreeing with her over her desire to become a boy.
Cincinnati-area Juvenile Court Judge Sylvia Hendon has ordered the removal of the girl from her parents’ custody to be turned her over to her maternal grandparents, who support the 17-year-old’s wish to transition.
The girl was hospitalized back in 2016 and diagnosed with gender dysphoria, depression and anxiety. The gender clinic at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center recommended hormone therapy treatment, but the parents refused, citing serious concerns.
The use of hormone blockers has become popular with those who are going through what has become known as “gender dysphoria.” But there are many who are both experts in the related medical and psychiatric field who are highly skeptical of these transgender-related treatments that are becoming increasingly commonplace within a clinical context.
“Since there are no long-term studies regarding the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones in young children and teens, this entire enterprise is, by definition, an experiment upon a minor — and a dangerous one at that, given the lifelong, permanent side effects,” Michelle Cretella, the president of the American College of Paediatricians, told the Christian Post.
Instead, the parents of this teenager, whose name has bee sealed in the court documents, stated that they wanted to pursue Christian counseling to “get to the underlying causes” of their daughter’s impulsion to become a boy, as reported by The Cincinnati Enquirer.
In this particular case, the girl in question is 17 years of age, but Dr. Cretella highlighted that hormone treatments are often being prescribed to pre-pubescent children.
“The transition-affirming protocol tells parents to treat their children as the gender they desire, and to place them on puberty blockers around age 11 or 12 if they are gender dysphoric,” she wrote at the Daily Signal.
But any element of choice or parental guidance was snatched from their hands when the girl in this case called a crisis line and detailed that she was depressed and suicidal as a result of her parents’ lack of support for her personal gender choices. Subsequently, the medical team from the hospital’s gender clinic said removing the girl from the custody of her parents was “a possible life-or-death situation” due to the seriousness of her mental illness, according to CNN.
The team further asserted that the girl’s condition had been improving since she’d moved in with her grandparents, and that hormone therapy was the only way to decrease her risk of suicide. “What we want to do in the coming months around May is plan for a high school graduation,” said Jeffrey Cutcher, the grandparents’ attorney. “We don’t want to be planning for a funeral.”
The county prosecutor and attorneys for the girl and the grandparents argued that anything less than full access to high-quality gender-transition treatment would constitute a lack of adequate medical care. But again, Cretella rebuts this claim.
“I have witnessed an upending of the medical consensus on the nature of gender identity. What doctors once treated as a mental illness, the medical community now largely affirms and even promotes as normal,” she robustly stated.
Prior to Friday’s decision in this case, Cretella said a ruling in favor of the “ideologically driven gender clinic” would be a brutal hit to “the ability of all parents to protect their children of any age from all aspects of this social and medical experiment.”
“The transition-affirming view holds that children who “consistently and persistently insist” that they are not the gender associated with their biological sex are innately transgender,” Michelle added.
“The fact that in normal life and in psychiatry, anyone who “consistently and persistently insists” on anything else contrary to physical reality is considered either confused or delusional is conveniently ignored.”
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The ruling judge admitted that this type of case is likely to come up again and that legislation should be passed in order to provide fellow judges with a framework so that they can assess 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,” Judge Hendon wrote, as reported by CNN.
“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.”