How to stop judges from kidnapping when parents refuse to gender-affirm their children

It’s been two years since Joe and Arlene Kutzko spoke to their daughter Sophie.

In 2024, the now-17-year-old was struggling with gender identity issues, which the counselor at her high school hid from her parents.

School officials encouraged her to “transition.” 

But when her Catholic parents refused to go along, the school reported them to the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families.

A judge removed Sophie from her parents and is considering DCF’s request to give her testosterone; her family has been barred from contacting her.

The Kutzkos are not alone. In Oregon, California and Colorado, child-protection agencies have removed children from their parents based solely on the parents’ refusal to “affirm” their child’s desire to transition.

But while the agencies have generally been the focus of attention in these cases, this sort of intervention — placing a child in a state’s care and ordering life-altering medical treatment — requires a judicial finding that the child is in imminent danger of harm.

Legislatures have created a high bar for meeting that standard: Negligence, parental drug abuse, homelessness and even domestic violence often do not.

So why do the Kutzkos find themselves separated from their child for refusing to go along with medical treatment that has been banned in many states and that a majority of the public oppose?

Where are judges getting the idea that failing to support transitions places children in danger?

The answer, in short, is pro-transition advocacy groups.

They’ve pushed on judges the false idea that transgender identity among children is immutable, and that a child who so identifies will suffer serious harm if not treated as the opposite sex and allowed to receive transitional medical treatment.

The two main culprits: the Williams Institute and the Trevor Project.

Based at the UCLA School of Law, Williams provides training to judges, law clerks and state judicial educators with a singular message: Children who suffer gender dysphoria and whose parents refuse to affirm it will kill themselves.

The institute’s director of judicial education claims he’s trained “over 7,000 judges, court staff and related court professionals from virtually every state on sexual orientation and gender identity issues for over 15 years.”

The Trevor Project, likewise, boasts that it has trained over 100,000 youth-serving professionals with the message that “gender-affirming care” for children and youth is “life-saving.”

On behalf of the largest organization of juvenile and family court judges in the nation, the National LGBTQ+ Bar Association developed training that approvingly discusses social and medical “transition” procedures, and informs judges that trans youth are often “unsafe” at school and in the community.

Lamba Legal’s curriculum for judges and attorneys teaches that there are more than two sexes and that there is a biological basis for transgenderism.

This is not the first time elite opinion with no scientific basis has trickled through our courts and ruined lives.

Almost a century ago, in the case of Buck v. Bell, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes found a societal interest in forcibly sterilizing “feeble-minded” individuals, upholding a Virginia law authorizing such procedures with a now-infamous phrase: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

The decision gave the green light for states to weed out those who, as Holmes wrote, “sap the strength of the state,” contributing to the forced sterilization of over 70,000 people.

The basis of Holmes’ reasoning lay in the “science” of eugenics — and the Supreme Court’s decision to incorporate into American law theories that led to the Holocaust were the product of years of advocacy.

Beginning in the late 1800s, faculty at universities such as Harvard trumpeted eugenics as the natural progress of Darwin’s evolutionary theories.

Philanthropists, including the Rockefellers and Carnegies, financed the spread of eugenics programs, and publications such as the New England Journal of Medicine in 1934 praised Nazi efforts to sterilize “the unfit.”

Today, we look back at that time as one in which junk science led to sickening legal decisions.

The science now shows that the mutilation and sterilization of children “born in the wrong body” is equally wrong, but judicial education hasn’t caught up.

Many judges are unaware of studies debunking the link between suicide and refusal to provide gender-transition medical treatment.

Disabusing them of transgender propaganda will require new training and guidance.

Many of our judicial education programs are funded by federal grants, including those from the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Assistance and the Administration for Children and Families’ Court Improvement Program.

Federal regulators have an opportunity here to ensure that judges are being trained accurately on gender identity issues.

State and federal court leaders, too, need to provide stronger oversight of these programs.

Only then will judges be forced to catch up to reality.

Tom Rawlings is a child-welfare attorney, former juvenile court judge and director of Georgia’s child-protection agency. Naomi Schaefer Riley is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.