The possibility of losing custody of your children, or potentially being banned from seeing them at all, is a loving parent’s worst nightmare. It adds an extra trauma to the devastation of divorce proceedings. What if one of your children decided he or she were “transgender”? What if you, as a parent, wanted to use “watchful waiting” as a treatment for this new change in your child? What if that stance effected your ability to see your child ever again?

This sounds like a nightmare, doesn’t it?

Indomitable journalist Abigail Shrier recently wrote on just such a case that played out in California. She sets the scene with the telling words from the biased judge.

“If your son were medically psychotic and believed himself to be the Queen of England, would you love him?” This is the question that Judge Joni Hiramoto asked father Ted Hudacko in a child custody case. This thinly veiled hypothetical was analogous to asking if Hudacko would support “transitioning” if his son were gender dysphoric.

Hudacko’s response: “Of course I would. I’d also try to get him help.”

This was the wrong answer.

The judge, who has a gender dysphoric child herself, maneuvered the rest of the proceedings to ensure that Ted Hudacko never sees his oldest son again. Before Ted’s insistence of “watchful waiting” and not going along with the ex-wife’s plans to let their 16-year-old begin a medical transition, no one would have declared him an unfit father. He just refused to fall in line with the cult ideology of affirmation. So much for not wanting to “trans the kids.” We all know by now that this is how leftist ideology works. They say one thing, do another, then call you crazy.

Back to Judge Hiramoto’s analogy. Let’s say your child was convinced he was mentally psychotic and declaring himself the Queen of England. Affirming him is a lie; it destroys the possibility of him being able to get better one day. Likewise, agreeing with your child that he or she is a different gender is a lie. Plain and simple. Denying custody on the basis of not indulging a child’s lie is a great injustice.

Shrier’s article is rich with other instances of courts taking away children from parents who refuse to go along with minor children declaring themselves the wrong gender and seeking to begin medical transitions.

This continuing moral and legal outrage is precisely what Canadians were warning us about. Our liberal neighbors to the north just lost huge ground in this very battle with the passing of C-4. This somewhat ironically named explosive bill has made it illegal for parents, pastors, counselors, or doctors to pursue any course of help for the gender-confused. (It encompasses all the LGBTQ+ “identities,” but this bit is the most pernicious.)

Hudacko’s loss of parental relationship and rights to his child are a larger commentary on the Left’s agenda to destroy the family and manipulate individuals to depend on the government. It is a movement that has been echoed again and again across the culture war battlegrounds. Why? Because isolating children from their parents makes them easier to manipulate, brainwash, and control.

Divorce is ugly, and there is always so much more to a story of a marriage ending than what appears on the surface or debated in a courtroom. But the father’s loss of parental rights to his oldest son because of a faddish insidious ideology should give us all pause.