A horrific lawsuit in Texas is demonstrating that the biggest threat to the family and the welfare of children by an overreaching government is not coming from Washington, D.C., but from a jury of your peers.
On Monday, in the supposedly conservative state of Texas, 11 of 12 jurors stripped a father, Jeffrey Younger, of his parental rights and ruled that he cannot stop his ex-wife, Dr. Anne Georgulas, a pediatrician, from putting one of their seven-year-old twin sons through hormone treatments for gender “transition.” The jury’s decision, according to LifeSiteNews, gives Georgulas “full authority to start him on puberty blockers and eventually cross-sex hormones.” Younger also lost the right to make decisions about his sons’ medical care, education, residence, and other parental rights.
This case is part of a custody battle in which Younger argues that his ex-wife is “transitioning” their son James against the child’s will. Georgulas, who brought the lawsuit, contends that James is a girl, calls him Luna, and wants custody over him and his twin brother, Jude. She is not the biological mother of the children, as the twins were conceived via in vitro fertilization with an egg donor. Georgulas is also asking for Younger’s visitation times with the children to be limited and supervised and also wants him to be forbidden to call James by his given name and prohibited from bringing him around people who do not “affirm” the boy as a “girl.”
Testifying on Georgulas’ behalf were therapists and counselors who claimed James told them he is a girl. They argue that the correct and loving approach to James’ gender dysphoria is “affirmation” — giving the child puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to conform his body to his mind’s impression.
Younger, the biological father and an Orthodox Christian, is morally convicted that this is all wrong and is also concerned about the possible side effects of the hormone treatments his ex-wife plans to introduce to his son, which include lifelong infertility from chemical castration. He says that when James is with him, he identifies as a boy and “violently refuses to wear girl’s clothes at my home.” But he lost his case. As a result of the jury’s decision, Younger will likely be forced to take a class on transgenderism to correct his wrongthink.
This is America in 2019: Where the so-called experts purport to believe that a little boy can declare that he’s actually a girl and the supposedly loving and correct thing to do is give him puberty blockers, administer cross-sex hormones, and in the future possibly encourage him through “medical transition” — the surgical removal of his penis — which is, in layman’s terms, mutilation. Where eleven Americans sided with the “experts” against a father trying to protect his son and removed his ability to do so. Where government interference in the form of a court decision in a family dispute puts a child’s welfare at risk, in rebellion against nature, reason, and moral decency.
This jury decision is an outrage and an injustice. The revocation of Younger’s natural rights as a father is morally repugnant. The conviction of Dr. Georgulas and James’ therapists and counselors that a seven-year-old boy should be put on harmful, unnatural hormones to change his body and “treat” his gender dysphoria — a mental illness — is itself insane. And what these people are proposing to do to James is horrible, long-lasting child abuse.
Government should not be interfering with Younger’s attempts to stop this injustice. It should intervene on his behalf to protect James by stopping child gender “transitions” entirely.
It is past time for social conservatives to stop expressing shock as transgenderism becomes protected by American law and start changing the law to end the abhorrent practice of allowing children to be given hormone therapy. Conservatives may make the argument from reason — the dangerous health risks of puberty blockers are well documented, and so to protect children, at the very least, these hormone “therapies” should be outlawed for children under age 18. But we must press the moral argument. Transgenderism is against reason and against nature. It is against anything that’s good for human beings, which makes it immoral.
We are born with particular bodies, male or female. When the body is afflicted with a deformity, as in the case of missing or malformed limbs, deficient organs, or intersex characteristics, those are not rights by nature. We call them “deformities” because they are malformations — not normal, but abnormal. The treatment is to help such a person by correcting the deformity. No serious person truly believes it is better to live with a deformity than without, and so we have developed medicines and surgeries to cure deformity when possible.
In the case of someone struggling with gender dysphoria, there is no deformation of the body. Gender dysphoria is a mental affliction. The proposed cure from transgender advocates for this mental illness is not to correct the mind, but to deform the body with chemicals and mutilating surgery to affirm that illness.
This is obviously wrong. Wouldn’t the best way to help gender-dysphoric people, especially children, be to treat the mind? Shouldn’t a gender-confused child learn about the gender he or she was born with by nature? How can anyone seriously contend that it is good to use chemicals children’s bodies do not naturally produce to override their normal genetic makeup and irreparably change their bodies, ultimately through deforming surgery to conform the body to the delusions of a mental illness?
The moral choice is to accept nature. The wicked and harmful choice is to delude ourselves by pretending boy can be made into a girl by unnaturally blocking puberty and surgically removing his sex organs. That wickedness is compounded when the government removes a father’s right to prevent his child from being irreparably hurt in this way.
Advancing the moral argument will be costly. The progressive Left will attack conservatives, hurling accusations of bigotry and derisively claiming we’re evil and ignorant and don’t know what we’re talking about because we don’t have degrees in medicine or psychology. But hear this: If the doctors and psychologists are claiming that a little boy can be transformed into a girl by cross-dressing, taking hormones his body won’t produce naturally, chemically castrating himself, and ultimately being surgically mutilated, they’re the ones who are ignorant, delusional, and evil.
And conservatives shouldn’t be afraid to say so. (For more from the author of “Child Gender Transitions Are Wicked and Harmful — and Should Be Illegal” please click HERE)
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