(OPINION) Noted writer Abigail Shrier is warning parents about how one particular case concerning transgender-identifying minor shows how gender ideology has “infiltrated” family law.
Writing recently in the City Journal, Shrier tells the story of Ted Hudacko’s combative divorce case in which a California Superior Court judge not only took away of his custody over his 16-year-old son but that he would also have no say in the boy’s medical gender transition.
Shrier noted the judge kept pressing Hudacko to accept that his teenage son was actually a girl. The judge even corrected the father in court about the use of pronouns when referring to his son in court, reminding him to use the word “they” instead of “he.” Hudacko “had used the ‘he’ pronoun because he remained deeply skeptical that the boy he’d coached in little league—the son he’d once seen crushing on a cute girl in his fifth-grade class—was actually a young woman,” Shrier explained.
The father told the judge he did not want his son to begin a medical transition. But within a few months, the court ended his parental relationship with the boy, giving him no say in stopping a scheduled medical transition for which he would later be charged more than $200,000.
Shrier, the author of the book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, cautions that gender ideology “also frames the unintended consequences of medical professionals’ fudging science, rewriting medical definitions, and tolerating shoddy research to placate activists.”
“At each stage, doctors may have thought: Where was the harm? And so, as a consequence, judges now decide the fate of children and their families based on phony, medically unsubstantiated metaphysics, as if it were factual that all adolescents have an immutable, ineffable ‘gender identity,’ knowable only to the adolescents themselves,” she continued.
“This is gender ideology—the belief, not backed by any meaningful empirical evidence, that we all have an ineffable gender identity, knowable only to us. This identity has no observable markers, and it is immutable (until the moment we change our minds and reveal ourselves as ‘gender-fluid,’ of course). It is promoted by virtually every practitioner of ‘gender-affirming care,’ it is unfalsifiable, and its hold on our legal system is gaining ground,” Shrier warned. READ MORE
