This Is Child Abuse

The case of James Younger, the 7-year-old being transitioned into a girl by his mother, against the will of his father, was ruled on earlier today. (I wrote about this case here.)

Jeff Younger and his son James
Image from SaveJames.com website

Earlier this week a jury ruled against the father, who was asking for sole conservatorship to prevent the mother’s transitioning their son—ruling that there should be a sole conservator, but it would not be the father. That was devastating news. (I’d like to know what went on in jury deliberations to get them to this decision. I think there was one dissenter, but a unanimous jury was not required.)

But today the judge, Kim Cooks, of the 255 District family court in Dallas, seems to have overruled the jury’s decision. There will be joint conservatorship, and the father, Jeff Younger, will have a say in medical decisions for the boy—which means the mother, Anne Georgulas (a pediatrician I do not recommend to any parents who love their children), cannot go ahead with chemical castration by puberty blockers or surgery without the father’s permission. Also, the father will not be required to pay court costs. 

The judge did, however, put a gag order on the father, so he is not allowed to talk about the case with the press. He has been manning a website, SaveJames.com, to get the word out and keep people apprised of the case, and this means that website will need to be taken down. (I downloaded court documents and some other materials while they were still available.)

After the Tuesday jury verdict but before today’s ruling, Texas Governor Greg Abbott tweeted this: 

FYI the matter of 7 year old James Younger is being looked into by the Texas Attorney General’s office and the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services.

I hope this means we can prevent any future case that puts a child in such peril. No Texas child should be abused in this manner while sane adults can step in and prevent it.

The mother had been asking for total conservatorship, supervised visitation for the father, without allowing him to say anything that did not affirm that the child is a boy—and she was insisting that he pay for the medical procedures to alter the boy’s body—twisting the knife, you might say.

Today’s ruling is at least a partial rescue and is good news.

It’s hard to know all the details of a case, but one detail we know for certain is that this is a very young biological male, in reality, whose mother is pretending (along with him?) and telling him that he is female. We know that she is willing to do away with his future ability to procreate or engage in normal sexual activity, and risk his physical and mental health in order to keep up the pretense.

There is so much that is disturbing in this case. One mitigating factor the judge may have taken into account was that the mother is not the biological mother; the couple used an egg donor. It’s unclear from stories I’ve read whether she carried the child—actually, children; James has a twin brother—or used a surrogate. But Jeff Younger is the biological father. To take all rights away from a biological parent and give them to a non-biological parent is troubling at best. In this circumstance it would be horrifying.

Family courts are messy places. Stories for another day.

James with his mother, presumably from her
physician website, from a tweet found here

Some information came out during the trial that makes me further question the mother’s sanity. She “realized” her son was a boy when he was three. The evidence? He requested a “girl” toy at McDonald’s. I don’t know what the toy was, but sometimes toys are interesting in ways that appeal to both genders. For example, some years ago there were little fairy dolls that you pulled a strap and they spun up into the air and fluttered down. They were pretty cool. It was the same principle as a non-girly version I had as a child, sometimes called a whirligig. It might have been made more intriguing to a girl when the fluttery thing looks like a fairy, but it’s still a pretty cool toy. And, at three, when children are exploring their world, they don’t even know that some distant marketing person decided an item might best attract either girls or boys.

What other evidence did the mother have? The three-year-old boy loved the movie Frozen.

Disney princess movies may always have been more attractive to girls, but that doesn’t mean boys don’t like them. My brothers, at age 4, enjoyed Snow White. It had messy dwarfs, woodland animals, and heroes, and was just visually worth watching. My grandson, at age 3, dressed as the snowman Olaf from Frozen for Halloween. We all sang along to the soundtrack. There was a reindeer and a hero, as well as a scary villain and a snow monster in the movie—not just princesses. Plenty to pull in every young viewer. Disney knows that; they make movies that way on purpose.

What kind of a mother jumps on evidence that thin to decide, for the entire life of her child, that he is not a boy as his biology clearly shows, but is a girl? An insane mother. Maybe one who had a fantasy about having a girl and a boy, and who now (with the dissolution of the marriage, and her apparent inability to bear a child naturally anyway) has no way to achieve that fantasy except by altering one of her existing children.

The father presented evidence that the mother has manipulated the boy. She withdraws affection except when he is behaving as a girl. When he is locked in his room for bad behavior, she tells him there are monsters who eat little boys.

The boy has always been happy to be a boy with the father. Could that be because he is trying to please the father? Yes. Just as much as he acts like a girl for the mother in an attempt to please her. This has been his life since he was three. What else does he know?

A week ago I mentioned the Candace Owens interview with Walt Hyer. He lived as a trans-woman for seven years, in his 40s, before transitioning back (as much as that can be done) into a man. His story began with a grandmother who used to take care of him. She thought it was fun to dress him up as a cute little girl, and she fussed over him, and gave him positive attention. This was their little secret, until he took a dress home with him to show his family, expecting their positive attention as well. He was too young to know different. The parents curtailed contact with the grandmother, but an extended family member used the information as an excuse to sexually abuse the little boy. These childhood issues were never resolved. He was actually seeking resolution to these issues when he began exploring transgenderism. If he had had a doctor who counseled him to resolve the real issues, rather than to transition, it would have saved him his marriage and family, his job, and a great deal of pain.

This little boy, James, whose mother calls him Luna, is being abused by this woman—and a society that allows her to continue. He will have to have therapy to deal with the confusion at some point. But his mother isn’t going to seek it. Will society even allow him to ask for help, once he’s of age to seek it on his own, to resolve the gender confusion?

I don’t know Jeff Younger, but I do know that a caring father would be going crazy dealing with what he has dealt with. When he would see his son on a video chat, the boy would be dressed up as a 6-year-old drag queen, long eyelashes and sparkly gown and all. And his only chance of being able to see his child depended on his remaining calm while witnessing the abuse. I saw a comment to an article suggest fleeing the country with his children, and disappearing. Matt Walsh, of The Daily Wire, said such a move “would be not only morally justified, but heroic.”  Any sane parent would understand the natural protective urge.

What kind of mother dresses a 6-year-old as a drag queen? Who teaches their child—son or daughter—that such a sexual look is appropriate? Who thinks that a person can’t be a girl without a dress on, or without nail polish?

If there is a person who exemplifies being controlled by societal stereotypes, it would be this mother.

This is, I believe, an important turning-point story. It exemplifies the corruption of the “woke” viewpoint.

These issues are not about any given person doing what they choose; they are about the demanding tiny minority exerting control over anyone who disagrees. I came across a good discussion of this assertion here. Note that, under Obamacare, all doctors were required to perform any transgender surgery a patient requested—with no conscience or religious exemption. Fortunately, that “transgender mandate” was struck down by a district court judge just this month. 

The data shows that gender dysphoria issues are often resolved through therapy and/or time; transition, claimed to be necessary in order to prevent suicidality, actually increases the likelihood.  It also deprives an otherwise healthy person of the possibility of procreation or normal sexual activity, and encourages surgically removing healthy body parts, against the medical axiom “First, do no harm.”

Image of tweet found at SaveJames.com/blog

Pretending that biological males are females denies real females their rights of privacy, and their accomplishments in sports.  It erases actual femaleness, harming all females.

Pretending that biological females are males also denies the value of being female, asserting that it is better to be a pretend male than an actual female. It isn’t progress for women that leads to this thought.

Sane people need to speak the truth, louder, while we still can.

Identity

Earlier this month I read an essay by Robert George, “Transgenderism,'Marriage Equality,' and Liberalism’s Tragic Error”—an excerpt from his recent book Conscience and Its Enemies. It’s philosophical, but I think it’s relevant to issues we’re dealing with. Issues we shouldn’t, if we’re sane, have to be dealing with, but here we are.

The essence of the essay is that there are two warring beliefs about who we are as humans: we are either mental energy in a random physical body—George refers to this as “nonbodily persons inhabiting nonpersonal bodies,”—or we are made up of a mind and body together, “a dynamic unity: a personal body, a bodily self.”

The difference is important, he says, because, “Whether in the courts, on campus, or at boardroom tables, it significantly shapes the expressive individualism and social liberalism that are dominant among elites.”

Christianity in general has rejected the nonbodily identity, in a similar way that Aristotle veered from Plato on the issue. As George continues:

The living body, far from being our external instrument, is part of our personal reality. So while it cannot exist apart from the soul—which is its substantial form—the body is not inferior. It shares in our personal dignity. The idea of the soul as the substantial form of the body is orthodox Christianity’s alternative to the heretical conception of the soul as a “ghost in the machine.” One can separate living body from soul in analysis but not in fact; we are body-soul composites.

My religion has something specific to say on this as well: we are who we are from before being born in a body; gaining a body is progress in becoming more like our Father in Heaven. This is the second paragraph of “The Family: A Proclamation to the World”:

All human beings—male and female—are created in the image of God. Each is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny. Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.

George’s piece is about the liberal elite view of marriage—based on what the mind wants to create and be, rather than what is biological or real. He is a mentor of Ryan Anderson, and one of the best minds on marriage today.

But I’m going to use these ideas to talk about a different letter of the LBGT etc. alphabet: the T.

found here

It is my belief that we are in this life who we were when Heavenly Father created our spirits, and this included our maleness or femaleness. It’s not a matter of which body we got randomly put into. It is part of who we have always been and who we will always be. God does not mistakenly put us into the wrong body.

That means that, if a person thinks they are a gender other than what they biologically and to the core of their soul are, then they have a mental problem, accurately called gender confusion.

It is not possible to change gender. Gender comes up in every cell of the body. Genetically a person will continue to have a Y chromosome or not. What can be done is chemical and surgical mutilation of a body that will continue to have in all its cells that Y chromosome or not.

With that reality in place, the question becomes, how do we treat people who claim to be a different gender than they are?

The human dignity answer is, treat them with kindness and dignity, but as who they really are when confronted. This would include allowing them the same natural rights as the rest of us, but ends at creating special rights that encourage their delusion or negatively affect the natural rights of the rest of us.

It could include better mental health science and research to help them in whatever way will lead away from self-harm and toward a fully functional human life of contribution and joy.

However, the politically dictated answer is, we go along with their delusion, no matter how that inconveniences the rest of us, and no matter how harmful to the gender confused person.

As I mentioned earlier this month, adults who have gone through surgical and hormonal reassignment suffer 20 times greater rates of suicide than those who don’t undergo a chemical and/or surgical change. Wouldn’t it be kinder—healthier for the gender confused person—to treat the mental illness, to help them come to terms with reality, rather than to indulge their delusion?

The American College of Pediatricians recently called it child abuse to submit children to gender reassignment, since 98% of gender confused boys and 88% of gender confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty. Isn’t it kinder to deal with the child’s confusion as an error that can be corrected, rather than indulge the error and deepen the damage that could otherwise have self-corrected?

So, let’s start the “bathroom” question with the assumption that accepting the delusion is more damaging and less kind than indulging it.

We dealt with the bathroom question this past year in Houston. To remind you, the lesbian then-mayor of Houston had pushed through an ordinance, purportedly for “equal rights,” that imposed a demand on all places with public restrooms or locker rooms to allow self-identified transgendered people to use their choice of facilities. The people immediately gathered signatures to put the issue before the people on the ballot to repeal the bill. Mayor Anise Parker illegally threw out the signatures, but was overruled by the courts. She tried to intimidate local pastors by demanding copies, transcripts, and recordings of their sermons and communications so she could look for words against her agenda. Again the courts slapped her down. In November the issue was put before the people and her bill was repealed, in part because it was successfully accurately renamed “the bathroom bill,” rather than “equal rights.”

People in a liberal city that had already twice reelected a homosexual mayor did not want to force all businesses and public places to force women and girls to share intimate places such as bathrooms—and even more shockingly gym locker rooms--with “self-identified transgendered” men.

The worry has not been about transgendered people, who are not only rare, but are not necessarily sexual predators (are probably not—although they are likely to still be attracted to the actual opposite sex, whom they’re sharing these private places with). It is that there is no way to identify the difference, and it takes away the rights of women and girls to feel safe. The law should not label a woman as a bigoted lawbreaker because as a punishment for feeling uncomfortable or threatened by a man. It should be obvious that is an infringement of her rights, and a loss of her freedom—as well as for those who care about the endangered women and girls.

In locker rooms, where private parts are more likely to be exposed, women—and particularly minors in schools—absolutely should not be exposed to the naked opposite-sex body and have no privacy from that person. Many of us thought the most traumatic part of going to junior high was being forced to shower and change in front of others of the same sex. (I’m told guys never had this same issue, but I’m telling you it was a normal fear and feeling among females.) A person who feels such natural modesty should not be told they’re the mentally ill ones, while the gender confused or the blatantly lying predator is protected.

We will not eradicate gender confusion, any more than we’re likely to eradicate depression, schizophrenia, or other mental illnesses. While we can work toward treatment, we meanwhile want to live kindly among suffering people.

We’ve actually been dealing with “transgendered” men in women’s restrooms for a long time. If they are serious about looking like the opposite sex, mostly they have been tolerated in the opposite-sex restroom, without a law. And good parents have been taking precautions in all restrooms all along: women take young boys in the women’s restroom with them. Once their boys are too old to do that, the mom waits just outside, within hearing range, and makes sure not too much time has passed. And boys have been taught how to avoid predators in those spaces. It’s not as ideal as being able to magically identify all predators and quarantine them, but failing that it has sufficed.

But females are more vulnerable, biologically, to sexual predators. It makes no sense to increase the vulnerability and then to shame them for noticing.

It seems like a parallel universe, that we are needing to discuss this obvious truth: men and women are different, and being separate in intimately private settings is respectful and important for safety. But a decade or two ago it was unthinkable that we would redefine marriage as something in which maleness and femaleness was irrelevant.

The “nonbodily persons inhabiting nonpersonal bodies” believers have the media megaphone. They are shoving their ideologies down our throats. But we don’t have to swallow.

The Emperor's New Clothes
illustration found here

If we don’t speak up wherever we can, we lose our freedoms. We need more of the honest child who stands up and says, “The Emperor has no clothes!” In the Hans Christian Anderson story, once the child spoke the words, everybody else gave up their pretense and embraced the truth. We need that to happen.