Parents’ Rights at Risk as Gender-Bending Policies Advance

By Sharon Slater | October 29, 2018

Parents across the world are fighting to protect their rights and their children from unscientific and medically dangerous gender ideology and delusions.

Increasingly, parents are being told by authorities to either affirm their child in a transgender identity and support their attempts to medically “transition” into the opposite sex, or risk having their child taken away.

Imagine a mom whose 16-year-old son has moved out to live with her ex-husband (who did not have physical custody) and then to live with various friends.

Mom then finds out that her son considers himself to be a girl. Despite having failed to obtain a court order, her son considers himself to be legally emancipated, and medical providers and the school district act on that assumption.

Mom then also learns that medical providers have been treating her son to change his appearance so he can identify as female. They refuse to share her son’s medical records with her.

The school district her son is attending also refuses to let her participate in decisions about her son’s education. The county is providing financial support to her son and will not share information about him with her.

Anmarie Calgaro is that mom.

To add insult to injury, Anmarie’s lawsuit against the medical providers and government agencies was dismissed by a federal judge in an opinion that accepts her parental rights but says she did not specify clearly enough the constitutional rights that had been violated.

No wonder Anmarie’s attorney calls this “a parent’s worst nightmare.”

The Thomas More Society, who represents this mother, explains:

“Her son, while a minor, was steered through a life-changing, permanent body altering process, becoming a pawn in someone else’s sociopolitical agenda and being influenced by those who have ‘no legal or moral right to usurp the role of a parent.’”

Thankfully, this case is being appealed to a U.S. court of appeals, which we hope will vindicate this mom’s rights.

The United States is not the only country where major threats to parental rights are putting children and families at risk.

Consider these troubling developments: 

CANADA: Canada’s most populous province, Ontario, recently passed a law that could allow the government to remove kids from their parents if they refuse to affirm their children in the opposite gender.

UNITED KINGDOM: Christian Concern in the UK is dealing with four separate cases in which parents are opposing decisions taken by schools and social workers to let children to “transition” from female to male, or vice versa.

CHILE: A law was passed in August allowing children as young as age 14 to identify as the opposite gender if only one parent consents.

And two more examples in the U.S.:

OHIO: As reported previously in our Newswire, a 17-year-old girl in Ohio was taken from her parents and placed with her grandparents because her parents would not allow her to take transgender hormones. (Transgender hormones can render the girl infertile for life).

ILLINOIS: The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services has declared that if a foster child seeks to explore another gender that “staff, providers, and foster parents” must “support and respect” the child’s exploration “without any effort to direct or guide them to any specific outcome for their exploration.”

Homeschooling parents in Sweden and  Germany have also been aggressively prosecuted for their decisions about their children’s education.

It all boils down to a direct assault on the well-established rights of parents to raise their children as enshrined in international law.

According to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which is binding upon almost every country in the world except the U.S.,

“Parents or, as the case may be, legal guardians, have the primary responsibility for the upbringing and development of the child” – CRC (1990), Article 18-1.

This provision reflects a critical, common-sense principle—that children need protection and care from those most invested in providing that protection and care, their parents.

State, national and international bodies cannot ignore this reality without doing real damage.

The gender-bending assault on our children and our rights is real and is increasing in intensity.

In future newsletters we will be providing you with tools to protect your children and family from this rampant radical gender ideology.