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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
Texas
Best article I have seen: https://thetexan.news/dallas-custody-battle-over-alleged-transgender-seven-year-old-will-resume-next-week/
Way too much to paste.
Thank you for the link. It is a good description of the evidence that seems to have been aggressively presented by both sides. The amicus attorney, Stacy Dunlop, representing the best interests of the child as a neutral was reported to be fine with the status quo — being treated as both a boy and a girl depending on how he feels. The jury’s decision seems to reject the neutral’s recommendation.
I hope they don’t put in a grandmother clause.
Many in the field of psychiatry follow the money. Not that long ago, magazines and newspapers covered how in TX, teens would be taken away from their families by court order to be placed in a psychiatric facility due to some diagnosis that was cooked up. Then when the medical insurance that paid the facility ran out, the teen would immediately be pronounced as being cured of whatever psych ailment that they had. “Oppositional defiance” “bipolar” “severe depression” or any of a number of other diagnoses were used.
In Calif, the mothers who have witnessed their daughters or sons being abused will end up being deprived not only of any custody rights, but must be able to pay for a therapist to supervise the weekly visits. Some time ago, it was revealed that the therapists who were the most frequently involved in this had to post kickback monies to the judges who decided that a therapist was needed.
I know many fine therapists and shrinks, but there are far too many who’ re willing to damage children as long as they can make a tidy profit on the child’s suffering.
All the times we do.
Hopefully the Texan will do a follow up story and @dong will alert us when that happens.
After reading that article and the others I could find, my best guess is that the jury determined that the status quo was unsustainable with the parenting approaches being so radically in opposition to each other. I am with the jury on that (but for the fact of the outcome they did choose). Then they were confronted with competing experts justifying too opposing theories of what was going on and what would be best for the child. There is a generally a strong bias to favor the mother, but if the mother’s approach had not been supported so strongly by “experts” it would have been easy to give conservatorship to the father. Absent the experts the mother’s conduct would be viewed by most people as too indulgent at best and child abuse at worst. Something about the makeup of this jury panel and/or the instructions pushed the panel to their conclusion.
How does that work? The Lege is not in session until after the next election. Maybe paste a link to clarify what “going before” means.
On the other hand, the Corleones would not have allowed the chemical castration of a 7 year old boy.
I am speechless. Stunned. Even Texas? Rational thought has disappeared. The world has long gone to hell.
They do have that going for them.
Texas.
However I am hearing via Tweets, that the governor in TX and the Attorney Gen there might be looking into the matter.
A lot depends on how you define child abuse. We now have an entire field of experts who are trying to fit the PC Identity world’s definitions into their lexicons. We are flipping the conventional, and dare I say, traditional thinking on so many issues over to these “experts.” However when critical thinking is used to examine their forcibly switching our culture around, it is easy to see the emperor has no clothes. (Of course, these types of “let’s modify our culture overnight” therapists probably can’t see the emperor wears no clothes, as they ponder if maybe he is actually an empress lying underneath surgically enhanced male genitalia….)
Well let’s hope the GOV can do something. This is absurd.
while I do not agree with what is happening. In this case a mother is being given custody rights to her child to bring up as she pleases. That is a good thing.
I agree that minimal government involvement in parenting is both good and essential. But I do not see this as a conservative/libertarian victory. We are not talking about a sole parent. We have a case where there are two parents seeking active involvement in their children even though they cannot stay married. (I saw in one report that the couple married as Orthodox and the marriage had been annulled. It is unclear whether the annulment was clerical, or legal as an alternative to divorce.) The state through the court procedure is now severing one parent’s interest while preferring another parent’s interest. Normally that is reserved for a finding of unfitness on the part of a parent. The jury made no such finding so far as I can tell. Instead the jury saw incompatible parenting and elected to permit one parenting style while denying another. If, instead of permitting/instigating “transition”, the mother was partying with and serving alcohol to the child, the jury would have had little qualms about preferring the father’s conservative parenting style. The difference it seems is that this mother got “expert” support for transitioning that would not be available to a different mother for alcohol and partying.
My experience is that when a divorce happens the child belongs to its mother. The father’s responsibility is basically as a required funding mechanism with minimal if any input.
I don’t think there is anything the father could have done as a parent short of sexual abuse that would make me give custody to the mother.
I thought her Facebook page would be fun. Not much there but 4 pictures, with some comments from friends about them. But not very many, probably lost many FB friends. No negative comments. Most interesting is the first 2 pictures, posted the same day, Dec. 2, 2018. The first one is a re-post of one from 5 years earlier, and is of 2 women with two kids, hard to tell for sure if the white girl is her, but probably. The second picture has what looks like black Sharpie marker scrawled all over it. My guess is that is a picture with the boy’s father, some kind of passive-aggressive post? No comments on that one.
Those are preceded by a graduation photo with what looks like the boy in a pink dress.
Funny thing about that… studies have shown that children of divorced parents who grow up with their fathers do better in life. Something having to do with enforced boundaries. You know, instead of blowing apart all sexual boundaries and ending up with your parts rearranged, for example.
It’s an unprovable counterfactual, but anecdotally, I can only think of one case I’ve observed where I thought the child/children would’ve been better off with the mother (and, fortunately, that’s where they ended up).