Our friends at Lifesite News have alerted us that Ohio government authorities have forced parents to give up legal custody of their daughter after the mother and father said they opposed the girl’s decision to identify as a ‘boy’ and transition to being 'male.'

Fr. Mark Hodges reports that Hamilton County Ohio’s Job and Family Services took legal custody of the teenage girl, 17, who, according to court records, suffers from gender dysphoria. The teen is currently living with her maternal grandparents.

The minor was diagnosed with depression, anxiety, and gender dysphoria after being hospitalized in 2016. Doctors decided that because she wants to identify as a male, she should be given testosterone and sex “change” drugs.

But the girl’s parents objected, arguing that they did not think that such "treatment" was in their daughter’s best interest.

Fr. Hodges reports that pro-transgender doctors pressured the court in closing arguments, saying a ruling must come quickly, claiming that the girl needed opposite-sex hormones or else she may kill herself. Medical witnesses said that the parents’ rejection of their daughter’s decision to identify as a male has made her suicidal. They termed the girl’s circumstances a life-or-death situation.

The parents testified that they only desire what is best for their daughter reports Hodges. Their attorney Karen Brinkman summarized their view of the case: “If the maternal grandparents were to be given custody, it would simply be a way for the child to circumvent the necessity of parents’ consent,” Brinkman told the court.

Brinkman reasoned that the girl’s medically-affirmed depression, anxiety, and dysphoria indicate that she is in no position to make decisions which would result in permanent physiological changes. “It does not appear that this child is even close to being able to make such a life-altering decision at this time,” Brinkman observed.

Now here’s the most chilling part of the story.

Fr. Hodges reports the girl’s and the grandparents’ lawyers both listed additional complaints about alleged parental mistreatment. The former claimed the parents’ sending their daughter to Catholic school where the dress code requires female clothing “caused additional trauma and anxiety” increasing her “suicidal ideation.” The later said answering to her real (female) name or even hearing it, or just seeing it on documents “has become a very big trigger” which “caused trauma.”

Pro-transgender Hamilton County Prosecutor Donald Clancy has intervened in the case, arguing that the parents are religiously motivated. He said the father commented that “any kind of transition at all would go against his core beliefs.”

The complaint alleges that the father told his daughter to kill herself because she was “going to hell anyway” for rejecting her female biology. It also accuses the parents of removing their daughter from transgender therapy and seeking “Christian” counseling for her. The complaint claims the counseling simply consisted of the girl sitting for six hours listening to the Bible.

The parents' attorney denied the prosecution’s allegations. Brinkman affirmed that the parents “have done their due diligence contacting medical professionals, collecting thousands of hours of research and relying on … their observation of their own child … that led them to the conclusion that (a sex change hormone injection) is not in their child’s best interest.”

So, let’s be clear about what is going on here: The government, in the persons of Hamilton County Ohio Prosecutor Donald Clancy and Hamilton County Ohio’s Job and Family Services, are alleging that sending one’s child to Catholic school is child abuse. And, furthermore, that parents have no right to direct a troubled minor child to seek spiritual guidance or use a practitioner who bases their therapy on Christian principles.

Instead, through the full weight of the government, in the form of its local prosecutor, parents will be mandated by the state to acquiesce to the child’s wishes in all matters of her treatment for her diagnosed depression, anxiety, and gender dysphoria.

One wonders what the prosecutor would do if the child had sued to use marijuana therapy to treat her anxiety – would the marijuana legalization lobby jump in to extoll the virtues of medical marijuana and get the local prosecutor to strip the parents of their parental rights? We doubt it, but that is the precedent that is being set here.

Clearly, politicians, such as Hamilton County Ohio Prosecutor Donald Clancy, are facilitating the anti-Christian and authoritarian impulses of the transgender lobby not because they care about the welfare of individual children, but because it enhances the power of the state to play God and manage other people’s lives.