A New California Law Threatens Swiss-Style Family Separation over Gender Transition

O n Monday, Governor Newsom signed into law a new bill preventing school districts from requiring staff members to disclose students’ “sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression” to any other person. Elon Musk reacted with a simple but foreboding response: “The state will take away your kids in California.” Alarmist? Not really. One need only look to what is happening in Switzerland to get a harrowing picture of the reality that unfolds when parents are kept in the dark.

The teenage daughter of parents living in Geneva, Switzerland, has been separated from her family for over a year by court order after they objected to her gender “transition.” The case, currently unfolding in Swiss courts, centers on parents who responded to the mental-health struggles of their daughter, including gender dysphoria, with care and support instead of hormone-blockers and surgeries. The state responded by taking their daughter away.

Concerned that their daughter was being pushed to make hasty and potentially irreversible decisions, the parents declined “puberty-blockers” and explicitly rejected her school’s attempt to “socially transition” her. In clear violation of parental rights, the school set her on the path to identify as a boy anyway.

Now, for seeking to protect the health and well-being of their daughter, they face a legal standoff over their fundamental rights as parents to care for their child who, residing in a government shelter since April 2023, is being encouraged to pursue dangerous medical interventions to “transition.”

To protect their children, the parents are speaking anonymously. As the father told ADF International, which is backing their case: “The story is truly a nightmare. Swiss authorities have taken our child, our daughter, who’s 16 years old. My daughter now lives in a government home. Our access to her is regulated by the government.”

“We want our daughter back home. We love her and we miss her,” her mother pleaded.

The parents currently are appealing a court order, issued in February, to hand over the necessary documents for their daughter to apply for a change of “legal sex.” The demand for the documentation followed the parents’ failed appeal to recover legal authority over the appointment of their daughter’s medical professionals, which had been granted to the state by the court. Their goal is to stop their daughter from “legally transitioning,” as this could pave the way for irreversible medical interventions.

These parents have lost their child simply for trying to protect her from harm. And if it can happen in Switzerland, it can happen anywhere. Parents, not schools nor the state, have the primary responsibility to care for their children. This is common sense and enshrined in international human-rights law. At a time when she needed her parents the most, Swiss authorities cooperated to block this girl from the love of her family. Schools and government agencies should respect the rights of parents, not rip their children away from them.

Any ideology that operates in the shadows, unbeknownst to parents, should trigger massive alarm bells. The Swiss case shows how even actively involved parents can be completely shut out when powerful actors coalesce around the rabid promotion of gender ideology.

In 2021, amid various mental-health concerns, the parents took their daughter to a hospital for help. After a quick, 30-minute meeting with doctors, in which she was shown the “gender unicorn,” the hospital team diagnosed her with “gender dysphoria.” This was all happening following the Covid pandemic, when the young teen had spent a significant amount of time alone, isolated from friends, and online.

At this point, the parents declined puberty-blockers, choosing instead to obtain private mental-health care for her. It soon became clear that what they were up against were not isolated forces coming from the school or hospital but a tight cooperation of the two, working alongside a trans-activist organization and the state child-welfare agency, too.

The parents shared with the school peer-reviewed medical and scientific literature raising serious concerns about “social transition,” as well as revised government policies from the increasing number of European countries moving away from the “gender affirmative” model. And yet they were ignored. “Social transition,” as has been shown in the game-changing U.K. Cass Review, often paves the way for physical interventions, such as the use of puberty-blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical mutilation.

Following the parents’ objections to their daughter’s “transition,” the school liaised with the state child-welfare agency, convening a meeting in which the parents were accused of abuse for seeking alternative care for their daughter. The child-welfare agency would later tell the parents to “just accept that you have a son.” Since then, the daughter has been physically separated from her parents and remains under heavy influence in the government shelter where the court sent her to live.

Because the court transferred the authority over which medical professionals she sees to the state, she has been allowed to stop the mental-health care obtained by her parents and may pursue medical interventions to physically “transition.” No loving parent should have to live through this horror.

No society can claim to be free if parents can lose their child solely for affirming biological reality. Secretive cases of influencing a child’s conception of his or her basic nature are happening with increasing frequency and severity, leading us all to question: Whose children are next? If, in a modern democratic society like Switzerland, parents can lose their children to the state simply for protecting them from gender ideology, no one is safe. The costs for parents, but above all for children, are too high. We must read the writing on the wall and act now to defend the rights of parents to care for their children before we lose them to the state.