Canadian judge rules father has no parental rights to stop daughter’s male hormone injections
A trans-identifying 14-year-old girl will be injected with testosterone despite her father's objections, a judge on the Supreme Court of British Columbia ruled this week. The father's refusal to comply, the judge said, was tantamount to "family violence."
As reported by the National Post, the child, known as "A.B.," has been at the center of a complex legal battle where her mother supports the medical transitioning — that will end the child's natural puberty — but the father does not. The mother has expressed concerns that her child might attempt suicide if the treatment is delayed.
“The totality of the evidence regarding A.B.’s medical needs … leads me to conclude that [her] hormone treatment should not be delayed further,” the judge wrote. "While A.B.’s father does not consent to the treatment, I am satisfied that A.B.’s consent is sufficient for the treatment to proceed.”
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The ruling states that the child, now in ninth grade, began identifying as the opposite sex at age 11, and that attempting to address the child by her birth name and female pronouns was an attempt "to persuade [Maxine] to abandon treatment for gender dysphoria; addressing [Maxine] by [her] birth name; referring to [Maxine] as a girl or with female pronouns whether to [her] directly or to third parties; shall be considered to be family violence under s. 38 of the Family Law Act.”
The child's father expressed his devastation late Wednesday in an interview with The Federalist.
“The government has taken over my parental rights,” he said, “They’re using [A.B.] like she’s a guinea pig in an experiment … Is BC Children’s Hospital going to be there in five years when she rejects [her male identity]? No they’re not. They don’t care. They want numbers.”
The National Post noted that the father "provided the court with supporting affidavits from Dr. Quentin Van Meter, a pediatric endocrinologist in Atlanta, Georgia, and Miriam Grossman, a psychiatrist in Airmont, New York, that discussed the potential harmful psychological and physical effects of gender transitioning on children."
The Christian Post interviewed Van Meter in December 2018 about the drugs and therapies used to medically transition children. He said that a core of "diabolical" people have engineered a takeover of influential medical associations and have overhauled professional guidelines to now favor transitioning children with these hormone treatments. But they are misdiagnosing the problem, he said.
"Every one of those [gender-confused] kids has an undercurrent of a psychological issue that is causing them to look for gender confusion as an outlet to explain how they feel," Van Meter said.
"And what they need to do is find regular, routine, local counselors to go to and find out what the real issue is. And it may be painful because the parents might be involved unwittingly in creating an environment that is causing the anxiety and depression for their child."
Yet the Canadian judge dismissed that evidence since they did not comment specifically on the case at hand and referred to the father's concerns as “disingenuous” when he said he wanted additional scientific evidence, noting “some evidence suggests that he has been delaying proceedings as a way of preventing his [daughter] from obtaining the gender transition treatment that [she] seeks.”
“We’re gonna fight this right up to the Supreme Court of Canada,” the father told The Federalist.
“We’re not quitting.”
This case is but the latest example of where parental rights are clashing with increasingly entrenched transgender ideology.
In November 2018, as CP previously reported, a Texas father found himself in the middle of a custody battle with his ex-wife who was pressuring their 6-year-old son into identifying as a girl. He was subsequently accused of “abusive behavior” for not supporting gender transition. In the couple's divorce proceedings the father allegedly engaged in “non-affirming actions” such as cutting the son's hair short.
And in February 2018, Judge Sylvia Hendon in Hamilton County, Ohio, ruled that a 17-year-old should be removed from the custody of her parents due to their objections to transgender medicine and transferred to the care of the grandparents who were supportive of the treatments.
