Transgender ideology has already achieved a powerful hold on our court system—and parents and children are paying the price.
The efforts of gender activists to educate family law practitioners have borne fruit. In another family court case in Arizona, parents lost custody of their troubled 15-year-old daughter when they refused to agree that she was, in fact, a boy.
There is no indication that any of this judicial “training” included hearing from a single de-transitioner—that is, one of a fast-growing movement of young people who already regret their hasty medical transitions—nor from any of the parents who have watched their teens’ lives made worse by a sudden gender swap, nor a single psychologist or psychiatrist who maintains skepticism about quick adolescent medical transition as a remedy.
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.” 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.
As for the doctors and mental-health providers opposing the dogmatic insistences of gender ideology masquerading as science, only a handful are willing to write and fight under their own names: Will Malone, Julia Mason, Patrick Lappert, Paul Hruz, Dr. Paul McHugh, Dr. Stephen B. Levine. And, yes, Ken Zucker. The rest work anonymously, through new organizations that have not yet managed to loosen gender ideology’s grip on the courts.