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[Updated] Texas Jury Abets Sex Transition for 7-Year-Old?
If any Texas Ricochet member can provide more/better background on this story it would be much appreciated.
Gateway Pundit posted a story about a case in Texas where a jury has severed the custodial interests of a father who is trying to keep his seven-year-old son from being transitioned to a girl at the insistence of the mother. What particularly caught my eye in this story initially was the involvement of a jury in what is generally a family court matter more typically adjudicated by a judge alone. And, then, a jury in Texas siding with the parent pushing for a sex change as opposed to the parent pushing to keep the child in the sex consistent with his genitalia. So I tried finding other online accounts to better understand just what the heck is going on?
Here is what I found out so far:
The mother is a pediatrician practicing in the greater Dallas area. So the jury pool was drawn from there. Apparently the mother and father are separated or divorced because they had a joint custody arrangement. But because the father disagrees with the mother regarding the child’s gender the child was a “boy” during time with the father and a “girl” during time with the mother. So the mother sued to sever joint custody and the father requested a jury trial (naturally assuming that “12 men good and true” would side with him).
Given the mother’s training and professional experience you would normally give some credence to her judgement regarding her son (daughter?). But the head of the American College of Pediatricians apparently believes that the mother is suffering from a mental illness:
“This case is consistent with a diagnosis of Munchausen by proxy,” Dr. Cretella told the media. “This is a disorder in which an adult feigns either physical or psychological condition in a child for their own subconscious reasons. Most often the perpetrator is the biological mother and she often has a background in health or medicine.”
“In the case of imposing gender dysphoria on a son, there are cases in the scientific literature of severe maternal depression triggered in a mother longing for a daughter. The mother’s depression lifts when the boy dresses and acts as a girl. This has been termed ‘gender mourning.’”
Apparently the jury was asked to determine whether (a) the joint custody arrangement should remain or sole conservatorship should be established, and (b) if a sole conservatorship which parent should be appointed. 11 of 12 jurors decided for sole conservatorship by the mother.
No report I have found details the evidence the jury heard. It is not hard to side with the jury on the termination of the joint custody arrangement as the child switching genders as he (she?) moved from one location to another was not sustainable. But why did the jury side with the mother?
From a far distance it seems that the father had every reason to suppose a jury would side with him. The child is seven years old. Wouldn’t most jurors find that awfully young to start a medical protocol to start transitioning? There must be more to the story.
[Update: The judge declined on Thursday, October 24, to follow the jury’s recommendation. Instead, the joint custody arrangement will continue, the parents are subject to a gag order, and the parents are to attend counseling.]
Published in Culture
Matt Walsh is goin’ on about it . . .
Key word in that story is “Texas.”
Oh dear G-d! Pray for that little boy.
I would not want to sit on a jury where the option was to vote against allowing the child to change its sex. To do so would leave you open to social destruction by the SJWs and MSM.
The mother should be arrested and tried for child abuse. As for the jury, it had no business in a family court battle. Surely there was some procedure violated to allow this.
However, the judge should have directed a verdict in favor of the father and granted sole custody.
That’s depressing. There’s no way that such a decision would’ve happened in the USA even three years ago (you know way back in the Obama presidency).
I wonder what was in the jury instructions.
This case could turn out to be a good thing, in the long run. Some pretty dreadful consequences are necessary in order to break the Wokeist hold on the Democratic Party, which seems completely taken over. These dreadful ideas are also quite strong in the Libertarian wing of the Conservative movement — though to be clear, I don’t know of any Libertarians who expressly support this type of thing for a child, but they do support it for adults, and in the case of a child, someone has to be the decision-maker.
This is the slippery slope. You start by breaking down the norm against premarital sex, then it’s no-fault divorce, then homosexuality, then sex-change surgery and hormone treatment, then doing the same to children. I know that the slippery-slope argument is no always valid. But here we are, very far down the slope. If there was a plausible intermediate stopping point, we sure didn’t stop at it. Which, for the scientifically and rationally minded, is the empirical evidence that the slippery-slope argument was correct in this instance.
The scary part is that I initially thought of writing that we are “at the bottom of the slope,” but this probably isn’t the bottom.
My heart breaks for this boy.
No way this momster could get away with this atrocity without the full power of the State behind it.
Is there appellate recourse?
The pediatric-psychiatric field has gone totally berserk.
The pediatricians need to understand how damaging it is for the credibility of all of pediatrics to allow this subset of the field to practice medicine.
I consider this to be abuse in all cases involving children because it is a parent or doctor telling a child he or she is not okay the way he or she is. By definition, that is abuse.
Now we have an entire field of medicine engaged in it.
I get the impression that the entire psychiatric and psychological profession has been berserk since the 1970s. Well, except Jordan Peterson.
This is a good example of the fallacy of expert rule. You get here by the use of experts to support an argument. The mother is a dr., a pediatrician, no less, and that gives her position more weight to the uninformed or willfully go along to get along group of citizens. They probably believe she is 100% correct in anything regarding the medical condition of her son, when her own mental state seems questionable. There was a lady dr. in Kansas that poisoned her husband and set the house on fire killing two of her children. She was not dumb, but mental. The experts can lead people astray, and often do. We take experts too seriously.
You’re so anti-intellectual!
Thank you. I think I get some of it from my husband, one of the wisest people I know, who has a high school diploma. He believes “Love many, trust few, always paddle your own canoe.”
A bill is going before the state legislature that would forbid the sexual transitioning of a minor.
Somehow we never connect the high percent of sociopaths in credentialed and executive fields with poor (or self-interested) judgement of “experts.”
Sometimes, we absolutely do.
I tend to be a bit libertarian at heart and think that the fewer laws we have the better. But this is one I hope passes.
I’d like one component of such a statute to require a stop in referring to it as transitioning. I don’t accept that characterization of these medical procedures and think that using such a term (intentionally) mischaracterizes the nature of the process and grossly diminishes the magnitude of the harm done to the individual.
Joint custody?
Same here. But the State’s monopoly on the court system is partly to blame here.
What is your alternative?
A private arbitration company they both agreed to.
I don’t agree to that and you can’t make me.
Yeah. Private arbitration companies can’t enforce anything, either.
CJ, this is the path to the Godfather. I mean that literally. Without a government monopoly on force, we must break down into competing bands, headed by strongmen.
This is an example of how Libertarianism is utterly impractical, at least at the anarcho-capitalist extreme. Most Libertarians allow for government monopoly on force, but want to limit the use of that power to prevention of force and fraud (which also turn out to be impractical, but that’s another story).
I appreciate all the comments but I haven’t read anything to explain what was the evidence presented to the jury. @arizonapatriot also asked a good question about the jury instructions applied to the case. The various accounts published online mention things that if actually presented to the jury would be very difficult to square with their decision. This raises the question of whether the public is getting information/arguments that were not presented to the jury.
I was hoping that a Texas lawyer might enlighten us on the procedural and legal issues that surrounded this case.
I can’t speak to the legal issues, but the moral ones are pretty clear to me. Chemical castration and permanent irreparable physical harm to any child is an abomination. I’m guessing I wouldn’t have been picked for the jury.
What state?
There has to be more to this story than we have read so far. It just doesn’t make sense. If there is nothing more this is truly shocking.
If the mother is using her child to get back at her ex, she’s sick. Some serious male hate going on! Calling Dr. Freud!