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Children's National Hospital in D.C. takes autistic child from military family, 'transitions' him without their consentEnvato

WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — Children’s National Hospital (CNH) in the nation’s capital faces a lawsuit for taking custody of an autistic teenager away from a military family over their refusal to affirm the gender confusion he expressed out of nowhere while hospitalized at the facility.

The Daily Mail reports that the family, whose identity is being withheld, says their son (who has since become a legal adult) told friends he “was LGBT” (the article does not specify what exactly he meant) but never indicated any desire to identify as female until November 2021, when at age 16 he was hospitalized following a suicide attempt prompted by the end of a relationship with his girlfriend.

CNH diagnosed him with gender dysphoria and held him for 41 days, refusing to release him to his parents and instead moved him to foster services, which placed the boy with a “single foster mother who had a previous assault charge and was alleged to be a close friend of” Lavender Kelley, the hospital’s activist, “non-gendered” chaplain.

The son attempted suicide again in July 2022 and was returned to CNH, this time as a “girl.” His foster mother removed him from a second autism assessment the following month, deeming it unnecessary. When that foster mother passed away, the boy is believed to have been given to Kelley herself.

The parents’ lawsuit against CNH accuses the hospital of a “full-on campaign to transgender this child” with “mental re-programming,” including compulsory letters to friends declaring he was now female.

“[We] had never known of [our] son’s purported desire or plan to change genders [sic],” the family contends. “Rather than treating [us] as patrons with legal and dignitary rights, the defendant… treated the parents as though they had harmed their son, even though the parents had never endangered their child and had home-schooled him to college entry at fourteen years old.”

“At Children’s National, it is as if all critical reasoning toward the child was suspended, and there was no investigation into the extent that the child was lying,” adds the suit. They are seeking a trial by jury and $100 million in damages to make up for the crippling legal expenses they have accrued fighting for their son, which has already forced them to sell both their home and a “thriving” business.

“This is the craziest case I’ve ever had,” said attorney Amos Jones, who is representing the parents. “I don’t know why there are people who think this makes sense. But I guess lots of people agree with this in Washington D.C. now.”

A significant body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.

Studies find that more than 80 percent of children suffering gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that “transition” procedures, including “reassignment” surgery, fail to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.

The danger of keeping parents in the dark about such developments is grimly illustrated in the story of Yaeli Martinez, a 19-year-old to whom “gender transitioning” was touted as a possible cure for her depression in high school, supported by a high school counselor who withheld what she was going through from her mother. The troubled girl killed herself in 2019 after trying to live as a man for three years.

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