The James Younger 'transition' case is only a starting point, not a conclusion

The high-profile family court case over whether or not a child will undergo gender "transition" despite his father's objections has reached a pause -- for the moment -- but that shouldn't be the end of the energy that formed around it.

Thursday afternoon, news broke that the judge in the James Younger custody case out of Texas — in which a jury had decided in favor a mother who wants to subject her seven-year-old son to transgender transition — had granted the father a co-equal say in his son's health care. However, the actual results of that arrangement for the child are yet to be seen, and given the simultaneous gag order placed on the father, the mother has a strong starting point to nonetheless force her plans.

But just because the case is paused for now doesn't mean the issue is going away, either for this child or any other in similar circumstances, and those who stood up to speak out about it would be foolish to act as if this outcome answered anything definitively about the question of putting minors through transgender treatment.

How many other children will end up subject to this sort of thing with no public pushback because their parents aren't in the middle of an acrimonious custody battle? How many will end up subject to it against a parent's wishes?

We don't let children smoke, drink, get tattoos, or make other decisions that they're too young to make, yet some members of our society think it acceptable and even laudable to allow and even encourage minors to go through with procedures that will leave them sterile and scarred.

Let's be clear about what we're talking about. Christian Post has reported a considerable amount about the gruesome realities of transgender procedures, especially for kids. Here's a sampling:

• "My once beautiful daughter is now 19 years old, homeless, bearded, in extreme poverty, sterilized, not receiving mental health services, extremely mentally ill, and planning a radial forearm phalloplasty, a surgical procedure that removes part of her arm to construct a fake penis," said the mother of a teenage girl who ran away and was taught how to inject testosterone by a pediatric endocrinologist.
• A doctor warns that "when you give puberty blockers to a pubertal-aged child, what you're doing is sideswiping them out of the physiological development that puberty is intended to create and facilitate. You are taking calcium out of the bones of girls which cannot be introduced later; you're putting them at risk for osteoporosis. On top of that, you're taking the ovaries and testicles, which have not yet started to mature to the stage of fertility, and you're cutting them off at the knees, essentially making them sterile."
• "Among the images shown [at a U.K. protest] was that of a young woman's surgically scarred chest and mid-section after a double mastectomy where the nipples were removed — euphemistically called 'top surgery' — to appear as male. And a picture of a forearm where surgeons removed layers of skin and tissue down to a patient's muscle and bone to construct a pseudo-penis. The procedure is called a radial forearm phalloplasty."

Does any of this sound like something that should be left up to a child's decision-making capacity?

There are legislative solutions that have been proposed. There is further research that has been asked for on the subject. Those things shouldn't end up forgotten and lost in the next news cycle. These efforts should still be pursued with the persistence and determination that comes with fights against grave injustice.

The national attention to the Younger custody case has heated up an iron. It's time for conservatives to strike it.

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