Please sit down and devote time to read Abigail Shrier’s devastating report on the case of Ted Hudacko and his son “Drew,” who was torn from him by a court in a divorce proceeding. Drew is 16, and believes himself to be a transgender girl. Christine, Ted’s ex-wife, supports Drew’s choice. Ted is not a particularly religious person, but he believed that Drew might be acting hastily. Here’s how the piece starts:

Before she decided to strip him of all custody over his son, Drew*—before determining that he would have no say in whether Drew began medical gender transition—California Superior Court Judge Joni Hiramoto asked Ted Hudacko this: “If your son [Drew] were medically psychotic and believed himself to be the Queen of England, would you love him?”

“Of course I would,” the senior software engineer at Apple replied, according to the court transcript. “I’d also try to get him help.”

“I understand that qualifier,” Judge Hiramoto replied. “But if it were—if you were told by [Drew’s] psychiatrist, psychologist that [Drew] was very fragile and that confronting him—or, I’m sorry, confronting them with the idea that they are not the Queen of England is very harmful to their mental health, could you go along and say, ‘OK, [Drew], you are the Queen of England and I love you; you are my child and I want you to do great and please continue to see your psychologist.’ Could you do that?”

“Yes,” Hudacko said. “That sounds like part of a process that might take some time, sure.”

“What process?” Judge Hiramoto said. “What is the thing that might take some time? Accepting the idea that [Drew] occupies an identity that you believe is not true?”

“The identity you just mentioned to me was the Queen of England,” Ted began. “I can tell him and I can affirm that to him, to reassuring him situationally; but objectively, he is not the Queen of England and that won’t change, and even the therapist in that case would know that.”

The then-54-year-old father of two teenage minor sons (Drew is the elder) felt that he was walking into a trap. For Ted, precision is not merely a requirement for his job but almost a constitutional necessity. His recall of every fact, date, and filing of the complicated court proceedings involving him and his ex-wife is astoundingly accurate—the sort of feat you might expect from a brilliant lawyer, not a distraught father battling the legal system alone for his son.

But at this point in the child-custody hearings, Ted couldn’t understand what the judge wanted from him. His soon-to-be-ex-wife, Christine, then an executive at the investment firm BlackRock, had already agreed to shared custody of their younger son; no one—not even this judge—seemed to believe that he was anything like an unfit father.

Ted isn’t a particularly devout Episcopalian, and he describes his politics as libertarian. He’s athletic, health-conscious, and takes a keen interest in his sons’ talents. He coached their baseball teams and researched conservatory programs for Drew, already an accomplished pianist. Just one year earlier, Ted had been one-half of a Bay Area power couple with high-status careers and precocious kids. Now, he was one-half of a contentious divorce, presided over by a judge who was referring to Drew as “they” and pressing Ted to accept that his 16-year-old son was actually a girl.

“And do you think that being transgender is a sin?” Judge Hiramoto asked, according to the transcript.

“No, of course I don’t think it’s a sin.”

“So you don’t think that it’s a sin. But you probably think that [Drew], if they are truly transgender, you would prefer that [Drew] not be transgender because in our society transgender people are the subject of a lot of discrimination. Would you agree with that?”

“I agree that transgender people suffer some discrimination and prejudice. I agree with that,” he said.

“I’m sort of going off the parallel experiences that I’ve read about or heard in family court or in family law classes for judges where gay children come out to their parents,” the judge said. “And sometimes it is difficult for the parents because they believe that the identity of being gay or lesbian, in their religion, is a sin. And then some people don’t feel that it’s a sin, but they say—they take a different angle, and they say, I just would prefer my child not to be gay or lesbian because they suffer so much discrimination in our society.

“So I’m sort of asking these parallel questions to see what is your—what I see in the papers is that you think that [Drew] is not truly transgender and that they are merely confused and—”

“He might be transgender,” Ted said. “He might be.”

“Okay. So if [Drew] might be transgender, it’s just to say they might.”

Ted realized his error and corrected himself: he had used the “he” pronoun because he remained deeply skeptical that the boy he’d coached in little league—the son he’d once seen crushing on a cute girl in his fifth-grade class—was actually a young woman.

“They might be,” Ted said. “[Drew]—they might be. Might be. We don’t know.”

While trying to keep an open mind about Drew’s gender, Ted was adamant to the judge that he did not want Drew to begin medical transition. In the 312 days since he had last seen his boy, Ted had done a lot of research on medical transition and gender dysphoria. He begged the court to consider research that suggested puberty blockers could impair cognition and diminish bone density. He knew that Drew, if administered puberty blockers along with estrogen, would be at high risk of permanent infertility. He wasn’t even sure that his son had gender dysphoria. He wanted to see his son—and he wanted this bullet train to slow down.

“It sounds to me that you would prefer that [Drew], when all is said and done, is just going through a phase. Is that a fair assessment?”

Ted evaded the question. Did he prefer that his son avoid a medically risky regimen that would render him permanently infertile and make him a lifetime medical patient? Wouldn’t anyone?

In the three years I’ve spent writing about families with transgender-identifying minors, the story of Ted Hudacko stood out as a case study of how gender ideology has infiltrated family law. It also frames the unintended consequences of medical professionals’ fudging science, rewriting medical definitions, and tolerating shoddy research to placate activists. At each stage, doctors may have thought: Where was the harm? And so, as a consequence, judges now decide the fate of children and their families based on phony, medically unsubstantiated metaphysics, as if it were factual that all adolescents have an immutable, ineffable “gender identity,” knowable only to the adolescents themselves.

Judge Hiramoto never disclosed that she has a transgendered child, and that she has expressed sympathy for trans activism online. I strongly urge you to read the whole thing. This poor man, Ted Hudacko, was dragged through a Kafkaesque legal system that was utterly against him, and so pro-trans that it beggars the imagination. Seriously, Shrier has the details here. There was never any consideration by anyone representing the court in this matter that Hudacko might have a point, and that transition for Drew might not be the best option.

You should understand that judges are drawn from a social class in which embracing and affirming transgenderism is the expected thing. People who question the trans narrative are monstered by this class. Ted Hudacko and his son never had a chance. Now this teenage boy is going to be permanently mutilated.

Reading Shrier’s story was like reading an account of the show trials in the Stalinist world. The actual guilt or innocence of the defendant was irrelevant. The political verdict was decided before things got underway. What we are seeing here is not just a totalitarian court proceeding, but totalitarianism that comes from the elite social class forcing its highly controversial views on the rest of us, as if they were holy writ. You don’t think it’s a class issue? Here’s how Shrier’s piece ends:

In January 2021, Judge Hiramoto transferred from Family Court of Contra Costa to the Criminal Division. For a year, Judge Wendy Coats presided over the Hudackos’ ongoing proceedings. Last Friday, Ted and Christine appeared before their new judge, Benjamin Reyes II. At issue: the temporary restraining order against Ted.

According to several witnesses, Judge Reyes commenced proceedings by stating his pronouns.

These people, these elites, they hate normality, and they hate people like us. You need to get it clear in your head right now that you too could be Ted Hudacko. You think you’ll be safe if you move from California to Texas? Ask Jeff Younger how that worked out for him in Dallas County, where a judge took his nine-year-old son away from him last year and awarded full custody to the boy’s mother, who is transitioning him to female.

In November 1996, First Things magazine published an extremely controversial symposium on the topic of “the judicial usurpation of politics.” It began like this:

Articles on “judicial arrogance” and the “judicial usurpation of power” are not new. The following symposium addresses those questions, often in fresh ways, but also moves beyond them. The symposium is, in part, an extension of the argument set forth in our May 1996 editorial, “The Ninth Circuit’s Fatal Overreach.” The Federal District Court’s decision favoring doctor-assisted suicide, we said, could be fatal not only to many people who are old, sick, or disabled, but also to popular support for our present system of government.

This symposium addresses many similarly troubling judicial actions that add up to an entrenched pattern of government by judges that is nothing less than the usurpation of politics. The question here explored, in full awareness of its far-reaching consequences, is whether we have reached or are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime.

Americans are not accustomed to speaking of a regime. Regimes are what other nations have. The American tradition abhors the notion of the rulers and the ruled. We do not live under a government, never mind under a regime; we are the government. The traditions of democratic self-governance are powerful in our civics textbooks and in popular consciousness. This symposium asks whether we may be deceiving ourselves and, if we are, what are the implications of that self-deception. By the word “regime” we mean the actual, existing system of government. The question that is the title of this symposium is in no way hyperbolic. The subject before us is the end of democracy.

We are at a new moment in which this topic must be taken up again. We are dealing not only with the judicial usurpation of politics, but with the judicial usurpation of family, and the biological destiny of children. It is hard to find words strong enough to describe the hideousness of what these judges are doing. These judges are not outliers, but key actors in an evil system — a regime — that is fast losing its legitimacy, in my view. Why are we sitting back letting this happen? Why do our elected representatives not care? Why don’t we make them care? Look at what they are doing to fathers like Ted Hudacko and James Younger, and to their minor children!

As you know, I am now back in Hungary, where abominations like this do not happen, because most people here are morally sane. And yet, many in the United States look at Hungary as some sort of semi-fascist state. Hungary is a country where the courts will not take children away from parents and permit them to be jacked up on cross-sex hormones. God bless Hungary! The day may come when carers request political asylum here to escape the gender “gulag” into which American judges sentence their children.

This has to be fought politically, and fought hard. What are we waiting for? The First Things symposium, if memory serves, ended with Richard John Neuhaus concluding that as long as we still had the democratic opportunity to fight the courts politically, we could not in good conscience withdraw consent from the regime. What about now?

You, father, and you, mother, are potentially an enemy of the state, simply because you do not wish to have your children mutilated and chemically transformed into a facsimile of the opposite sex. Think about that. None of us are safe from what happened to Hudsacko and Younger, and their sons. All it takes is an angry, divorcing spouse, and a child who thinks they have gender dysphoria, having been propagandized relentlessly by pop culture and the schools.

Here is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s short 1974 essay “Live Not By Lies,” from which I took the title of my book about building resistance to this new form of totalitarianism. Solzhenitsyn says that not everybody has to be a hero, but there are things that all of us must be prepared to do, right now, to refuse to accept the lies of the system. This is the conclusion:

It will not be an easy path, perhaps, but it is the easiest among those that lie before us. Not an easy choice for the body, but the only one for the soul. No, not an easy path, but then we already have among us people, dozens even, who have for years abided by all these rules, who live by the truth.

And so: We need not be the first to set out on this path, Ours is but to join! The more of us set out together, the thicker our ranks, the easier and shorter will this path be for us all! If we become thousands—they will not cope, they will be unable to touch us. If we will grow to tens of thousands—we will not recognize our country!

But if we shrink away, then let us cease complaining that someone does not let us draw breath—we do it to ourselves! Let us then cower and hunker down, while our comrades the biologists bring closer the day when our thoughts can be read and our genes altered.

And if from this also we shrink away, then we are worthless, hopeless, and it is of us that Pushkin asks with scorn:

Why offer herds their liberation? 

[For them are shears or slaughter-stall]
Their heritage each generation
The yoke with jingles, and the whip.

He’s saying that we can be like the dumb cows of the herd, or we can be men and women. Are we Americans going to allow the state to do this to us and our children? Are we just going to cower, and leave poor souls like Ted Hudacko and James Younger to be destroyed in trying to protect their children?

The times are very dark. Be a light. Be a damn blowtorch.

UPDATE: It was a joke when Monty Python did it. But this is happening at a real university in the UK:

Another section explains how noun-self pronouns are used by “xenic” individuals whose gender does not fit within “the Western human binary of gender alignments”. The webpage adds: “For example, someone who is catgender may use nya/nyan pronouns.”

Catgender, it says, is someone who “strongly identifies” with cats or other felines and those who “may experience delusions relating to being a cat or other feline”. The word nyan is Japanese for “meow”.

Here’s video of a Bristol University crew member picnicking at sea:

UPDATE: Ted Hudacko comments:

I am humbled by the attention my family’s story has garnered and heartened by responses such as MichaelGC’s. I need a volunteer to do a small but urgent thing in Sacramento—please contact me for details. The final continuation of my matter is now scheduled (in-person only) to 1:30pm PST Friday 2/25/2022, Courtroom 229, Spinetta Family Law Center, 751 Pine Street, Martinez, California.