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.

The following is an excerpt from Blaze Media's Capitol Hill Brief email newsletter:

The case of 7-year-old James Younger from Texas, who may be court-ordered into a gender transition forced by his mother despite his father’s petitions, has grabbed national attention and generated national uproar. Public officials from the Lone Star State have since announced efforts to address the grave situation and others like it on the public policy front.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said Wednesday night that the matter is being evaluated by both the state attorney general’s office and the Department of Family and Protective Services. At the same time, Texas legislator Matt Krause said that he’s planning to introduce legislation “that prohibits the use of puberty blockers in these situations for children under 18.” In Washington, Congressman Chip Roy asked the Justice Department, National Institutes for Health, and the Office of National Drug Control Policy to look into the matter.

The jury’s decision in the case made headlines earlier this week; however, the judge’s final ruling was delayed until this afternoon. We’ll soon know the details of the boy’s fate, and then we’ll find out whether any of the interventions will be enough to spare him from his mother’s plans.

A 242-187 majority of the House of Representatives voted Thurdsay to override the Trump adminsitration's policy on transgender troops serving in the U.S. military.

The vote itself was on an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act — Congress' big, annual military authorization bill.

A report on the bill and its amendments from the House Armed Services Committee explains that the amendment "requires that qualifications for eligibility to serve in an armed force account only for the ability of an individual to meet gender-neutral occupational standards and not include any criteria relating to the race, color, national origin, religion, or sex (including gender identity or sexual orientation) of an individual."

The measure initially passed by a voice vote the day before, but Democrats requested a roll call, wanting to go on record against the president's transgender policy.

“Over the last three years, 14,000 transgender service members have served openly and successfully,” amendment sponsor Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., said on the House floor Wednesday. “We know what transgender service members bring to the fight; let them bring it.”

Ten Republicans joined with Democrats in support of the amendment.

President Trump announced an end to transgender military service two years ago in June 2017, tweeting, "Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail."

After studying the issue, the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security determined that "the accession or retention of individuals with a history of diagnosis of gender dysphoria - those who may require substantial medical treatment, including through medical drugs or surgery - presents considerable risk to military effectiveness and lethality."

The Supreme Court ruled in January that the policy could go into effect as lawsuits work their way through lower courts on the issue. The policy went into effect earlier this year, though some state National Guards are openly defying the new policy.

The Senate passed its version of the NDAA last month with no such transgender language. The differences between the bills will have to be resolved before it can go to the president's desk.

A Democratic effort to codify transgenderism into federal civil rights law has drawn the criticism of yet another prominent feminist activist.

At a Thursday Capitol Hill press conference put together by Rep. Vicky Hartzler, R-Mo., Women's Liberation Front board member Kara Dansky introduced herself as a "lifelong Democrat and a proud feminist" and said the socially conservative politicians alongside her at the event probably "profoundly disagree" with her on several issues.

"But we are here together to take a strong stand for the rights, privacy, and safety of women and girls," Dansky continued, "all of which are threatened by the so-called 'Equality Act.'"

H.R. 5, the so-called, “Equality Act,” is expected to go to a floor vote in House of Representatives this week. Basically, it would add sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) as protected classes to federal civil rights law.

Dansky went on to list multiple reasons why the legislation would be bad news for women, if it were enacted, because it would "reconfigure" sex based on the "ill-defined and nebulous" idea of gender identity. She explained that "there is no way both do that and also protect women's rights" and provided three reasons why:

"One: The word woman means 'adult human female.' Women have been fighting for our rights as women for thousands of years," Dansky said. "As the men who excluded us from the franchise at the dawning of the republic knew, the word 'sex' has meaning."

"Two: Women and girls fought hard for sex-segregated spaces, and we're not giving them up," she continued. "Not so long ago, there were no such things as women's bathrooms, locker rooms, or changing rooms. ... As long as the epidemic of male violence against women continues, women have the right to demand separate spaces from males, regardless of how they identify.

"Three: The notion of defining sex to include gender identity has material consequences for women and girls," Dansky concluded. "Over the centuries, our society has created schools, scholarships, dormitories, business loans and other concrete benefits for women and girls precisely because we had been excluded from the public sphere for so long."

But under the provisions of the "Equality Act," those spaces and opportunities would have to be open to biological males as well.

Dansky is not the first left-leaning feminist to voice opposition to the bill's provisions redefining sex and gender. At a hearing on the legislation back in April, lesbian activist Julia Beck called the bill a "human rights violation."

"If the act passes in its current form as H.R. 5, then every right that women have fought for will cease to exist," Beck told the House Judiciary Committee. "Every person in this country will lose their right to single-sex sports, grants, shelters, and loans. The law will forbid ever distinguishing between women and men."

At Thursday's press conference, Republican House members also warned about the "Equality Act's" potential affects on unborn life and conscience rights.

"It would require a universal right to abortion, up until birth," House Freedom Caucus member Debbie Lesko, R-Ariz., warned of the bill.

Lesko has introduced an amendment that seeks to create pro-life protections within the framework of the legislation by stating that nothing in the act "may be construed to grant or secure any right relating to abortion or the provision or funding thereof."

Another House Freedom Caucus member, Rep. Jody Hice, R-Ga., warned that the bill's adversarial provisions against religious liberty would have far-reaching and harmful implications for traditional believers all over the country:

Faith-based adoption agencies would have to violate their convictions of finding a mother and a father for a child or shut down. Small business owners of faith would have to violate their convictions on morality and marriage, and sexuality or close the doors. Churches and faith institutions would have to abandon the teachings of their church in order to participate in federally funded programs, so that things like Catholic schools could lose the national school lunch program. Jewish synagogues could lose grants for protection from terrorist threats. Churches could lose FEMA disaster aid. And faith-based colleges and universities could lose federal student aid.

"This is a horrifying bill," Hice continued. "The Democrats are exposing themselves as the party willing to use the strong arm of government to oppress Americans, to demonize religion and religious liberties, and to circumvent our constitution."

Full video of Thursday's press conference is available here: