Courts are increasingly using Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy diagnoses to separate trans kids from their families.
Erin* was in the midst of divorce proceedings when the custody trouble began. She was sharing custody of her four children, ages three to nine, with her soon-to-be ex-husband when the children reported feeling unsafe at their father’s. At times, he was drunk and violent, they said. In 2017, one of the children called the police, and two of them reported that their father squeezed their necks and lifted them up by their necks when they misbehaved.
The legal basis for equating such care with child abuse is spurious and comes from a legal opinion issued by Texas attorney general Ken Paxton in February. Paxton’s opinion is full of citations of cases takenand twists the overly broad definition of abuse to make his argument. But he also leans on arguments that have been made in custody cases involving trans youth for years that claim a child’s gender variance is heavily influenced by a parent—almost always the child’s mother.
Although trans children receive diagnoses of gender dysphoria, many supportive parents don’t consider being trans to be an illness of any kind. “Being trans is valid and normal and just simply, you know, a human condition,” says Camellia Bellis, the founder of Parents in Transition, a support group for affirming parents involved in custody disputes.
The research showed that in all but one of the 10 cases, affirming mothers reported coercive and controlling behaviors by their partners, in some cases including emotional and psychological abuse. In, the father had a documented history of domestic violence and was still granted sole custody of the children. “In some cases, if it wasn’t gender, it’d just be something else, but gender is so ripe for the controlling partners to grab onto.
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