By LifeSiteNews (Politics) | Created at 2024-10-01 10:13:14 | Updated at 2024-10-01 13:37:22
3 hours ago
Tue Oct 1, 2024 - 6:00 am EDTMon Sep 30, 2024 - 10:07 am EDT
(LifeSiteNews) — Swiss parents – who have chosen to remain anonymous in order to preserve their family’s privacy – are fighting desperately to save their child. Their then-15-year-old daughter was removed from the familial home 19 months ago after they objected to giving her puberty blockers and assist their daughter in facilitating a supposed “sex change.” Puberty blockers frequently cause permanent and irreversible damage, including osteoporosis, spinal problems, increased risk of heart problems, sexual dysfunction, and permanent infertility.
Despite that reality – and the fact that many European medical institutions, including the U.K.’s National Health Service, now see puberty blockers as experimental at best and dangerous at worst – a Swiss court ordered the young teenage girl, who is now 16, to be taken from her “transphobic” parents by social services and placed in a group home called the “foyer.” She has now been there for over a year while her parents risk criminal changes to get her back.
The parents recently described their ordeal in a lengthy report to Fox News. “This is not a question of human rights,” the father told Fox News. “This is a question of conducting medical experiments on children.” The parents call their struggle against an array of powerful institutions – the school system, the medical establishment, social services, and the courts – a nightmare, saying that they feel “marginalized,” “powerless,” and that their lives feel like the “Twilight Zone.”
According to the father, when their daughter told them in 2021 that she identified as a boy, “it was an absolute surprise. She was 13 at the time and she had never previously demonstrated any inclination towards masculinity or any proclivity for masculine behaviour, ever.”
Like so many parents, they decided to reach out for professional medical help, unaware that many health institutions have been captured by trans activists. The father had always been close to his daughter, and the pandemic – with school closures and consequently much time spent online – had been difficult for the entire family. “We said to our daughter, ‘Well, this is a surprise, but we will listen to you, and we will seek medical advice,” the father told Fox. “We will all learn together and make decisions together.” The advice they received, however, put their family on a tragic trajectory. According to Fox:
At the recommendation of their child’s pediatrician, they took their daughter to the public children’s hospital in Geneva, where she was shown a “gender unicorn” [I covered the “gender unicorn” here] and was asked to identify with various aspects of the image, after which it was determined that she was “likely experiencing gender dysphoria.” The director of the ward then met with the parents and explained that the hospital was conducting “rigorous research” around the question of gender identity and that their daughter would receive a “comprehensive and serious assessment.”
The family was told that their role was to “support [their daughter] in her identity,” including assisting her in “socially transitioning,” which meant helping her to “present as male” by facilitating a short haircut and buying breast binders, which would flatten her chest to disguise her femininity. The parents agreed and continued to consult with the psychiatrist at the hospital.
Several months later, they were told that the next step for their daughter was puberty blockers, which would begin to facilitate major physical changes in their daughter. At that, the parents balked.
“We’re not at the stage where we’re going to be giving our daughter any medication,” the father responded, telling Fox: “We saw firsthand in our interaction with the hospital, that there was no serious medical assessment being conducted. It was simply, ‘Well your daughter has pointed to these elements on the gender unicorn, and therefore, she’s a boy because she says so.’” The family secured a private psychiatrist for a second opinion – but against the parents’ wishes, the private school their daughter attended began to facilitate a “social transition,” treat her as a male, and even “connected her with a transgender advocacy organization.”
A school psychiatrist called Swiss Child Protection Services and informed them that the girl needed “protection from her ‘transphobic’ parents” following their continued objection to puberty blockers.
According to the father:
The school was facilitating meetings between our daughter and [the trans activist group] and our daughter and [child services] not only without our knowledge, but fraudulently, because they were marking her absentee form as if she was doing school activities. We later found out she wasn’t. She was out of school meeting with the [trans activists] and [child services].
Child services got a court order permitting them to remove her from her parental home based on “mental and physical health concerns.” The Swiss authorities declined to provide any comment to Fox News, while the father told Fox that the specific type of abuse that they had allegedly perpetrated was never specified.
The parents are now desperately attempting any legal avenue possible to get their daughter back, and the case has begun to attract international attention. “I want her to come home so that we can get her back on a healthy track,” the father told Fox News. “For her own well-being and that of her entire family.”
This Swiss family is not the only one. In every jurisdiction that implements gender ideology, the state eventually comes to take children away from their parents – in Canada, the United States, and elsewhere.
Jonathon’s writings have been translated into more than six languages and in addition to LifeSiteNews, has been published in the National Post, National Review, First Things, The Federalist, The American Conservative, The Stream, the Jewish Independent, the Hamilton Spectator, Reformed Perspective Magazine, and LifeNews, among others. He is a contributing editor to The European Conservative.
His insights have been featured on CTV, Global News, and the CBC, as well as over twenty radio stations. He regularly speaks on a variety of social issues at universities, high schools, churches, and other functions in Canada, the United States, and Europe.
He is the author of The Culture War, Seeing is Believing: Why Our Culture Must Face the Victims of Abortion, Patriots: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Pro-Life Movement, Prairie Lion: The Life and Times of Ted Byfield, and co-author of A Guide to Discussing Assisted Suicide with Blaise Alleyne.
Jonathon serves as the communications director for the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform.
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