Custody case will determine whether transgender teen can get hormone therapy
Shutterstock.com.
An Ohio judge is considering whether to award full custody of a transgender teen to his grandparents so he can pursue hormone therapy that is opposed by his parents.
Visiting Judge Sylvia Hendon heard arguments in the case Friday in Hamilton County, and will rule before Feb. 16, report the Cincinnati Enquirer and WLWT5.
The parents of the 17-year-old agree he should continue to live with his grandparents, but they want to block hormone therapy.
Job and Family Services placed the teen with his grandparents after the agency was awarded temporary custody last year. Representing the agency, Hamilton County assistant prosecutor Don Clancy said the child “teeters on the edge of suicidal ideation” and he needs as much support as he can get. The grandparents “accept their grandson for who he is,” Clancy said.
The teen had emailed a crisis hotline in November 2016, saying his parents would only allow him to get Christian-based therapy and had told him to kill himself because he was going to hell anyway, according to court documents.
According to Clancy, the parents called an expert witness in the case who testified that “a small cabal of lobbyists and politicians invented the term ‘gender dysphoria’…and the treatment for it.”
Karen Brinkman, a lawyer representing the parents, argued that the teen is not equipped to make the treatment decision. She asserted that the parents’ words had been “taken out of context, twisted, exaggerated, blown out of proportion and then improperly used against them.”
