Ron DeSantis Isn’t Going to ‘Legally Kidnap’ Your Children

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, May 18, 2023

 

Apparently, there are real people in American public life who require assurances that Governor Ron DeSantis is not, in fact, weaponizing Florida law to allow for the forcible abduction of children. They’ve whipped themselves up into a froth over a new Sunshine State law restricting minors’ access to surgical and hormonal therapies as remedies for gender dysphoria, which has produced paroxysms in the press.

 

The legislation DeSantis just signed represents an effort “to make trans lives illegal,” according to Rolling Stone legal commentator Chris Geidner. Ultimately, the New Republic warned, the “horrifying” bill DeSantis endorsed will empower the state to “kidnap kids in Florida.” The Pensacola News Journal led with the characterization of the law by its critics “as the Florida ‘abduction’ bill because they claim it allows children to be ‘legally kidnapped’ by disagreeing parents.” Ruminate on that one: “legally kidnapped” by “disagreeing parents.”

 

The acute hypertension this law has inspired in certain high-strung media cantons is more reflective of Governor DeSantis’s national profile than of the law’s substance, laws like it around the country, or statutes in blue states which radically denude parents’ rights over the minors in their care. Some of the issues here are complex, but others aren’t. Among the issues that aren’t is the claim that DeSantis is drafting police and courts into a campaign to “kidnap kids in Florida.”

 

The provision in one of the several trans-related laws DeSantis signed this week that has so enlivened political media bars the use of hormonal therapies on and sex-reassignment surgery for minors. As a corollary, the state has made it a first-degree misdemeanor offense for medical professionals to violate that proscription, and it has provided guidance to the courts as to how to adjudicate offenses — potentially including the issuance of warrants to take physical custody of a child who is “being subjected to or is threatened with being subjected to sex-reassignment prescriptions or procedures.”

 

The law expands the definition of “harm” involving children to include surgical or hormonal remedies for body dysmorphia, which could theoretically grant the state temporary emergency custody of the children based on the assessment of the courts — as in any other case of “mistreatment or abuse.” The law does not, however, grant the state unchecked power to abduct children from their homes. It does not summarily rob families of custody over their children. It doesn’t even alter existing Florida laws pertaining to child welfare or foster care. As even the archconservative venue PolitiFact concedes, the statute is “pretty narrow”:

 

It applies only to custody agreements that originated in states other than Florida. And it enables courts to make custody decisions for children who are receiving trans health care for a designated period of time, but does not dictate what those decisions must be, or favor parents who are denying gender-affirming care for their children.

 

The law is, however, likely to apply to ongoing custody disputes between parents in the foreseeable scenario in which one parent wants the minor to receive transitional therapies and the other does not. It also alters statutes pertaining to petitioners who seek custody of a child to prevent the child from being taken out of Florida where he or she might “suffer serious physical harm.”

 

Whether pharmaceutical or surgical remedies constitute “harm” is a matter of some debate, but it’s not one in which critics of the Florida law seem eager to engage. Reasonably so, too, because the subject matter is stomach-turning.

 

Take, for example, the case of one of America’s most famous childhood transitioners, reality-television star Jazz Jennings. “At 17, even though a minor, Jazz underwent multiple genital surgeries to remove his penis and have it inverted,” PJ Media’s Megan Fox reports. “This process was botched, and several attempts were made to remedy it, but the reduced size of Jazz’s penis due to years on puberty blockers made an already brutal surgery even worse.” Ever since, the young celebrity suffers from “mental illness, rapid weight gain, pain, constant reflux, a lack of sex drive, an inability to orgasm, and anxiety.”

 

Physicians tasked with performing these surgeries are increasingly discomfited by the decisions they must make in the absence of clinical data. Dr. Marci Bowers, the surgeon who performed Jennings’ vaginoplasty operations, has admitted that the evidence increasingly suggests that physicians should abstain from prescribing puberty blockers to young teenagers due to the risk of permanent complications. “There are definitely people who are trying to keep out anyone who doesn’t absolutely buy the party line that everything should be affirming, and that there’s no room for dissent,” Bowers complained of the activist class.

 

As gender therapist Christine Milrod wrote for the Journal of Sexual Medicine, psychologists are also increasingly squeamish about issuing diagnoses that become the predicate for life-altering surgical or pharmaceutical treatments in kids:

 

[There is] “a genuine expression of fear among clinicians in making the wrong diagnosis, based on the fact that young people often experiment with gender role behavior as a consequence of normative identity development, and perhaps more so when the adolescent is gender variant.”

 

Lastly, Florida’s law seems a mirror image of wildly permissive statutes that abrogate the rights of concerned parents in Democrat-led jurisdictions — statutes that have failed to pique the righteous ire of the journalistic establishment.

 

A 2021 memo published in the Cincinnati Board of Education meeting minutes, for example, “tells schools to consider reporting child abuse to Hamilton County Job and Family Services if a student’s gender identity puts them at risk at home.” Per Fox News:

 

“Parents may or may not be supportive of the student’s gender identity,” it states. “This information should not be shared with parents if disclosing the information to parents could put the student at risk of harm at home. In that case, the administrator should also consider whether there is a mandatory duty to report child abuse to 241-KIDS.”

 

In Minnesota, a bill that passed the state house is designed to ensure that minors are allowed to receive sex-change surgery and hormone therapy in the absence of parental consent. If it somehow became law, the State of Minnesota would be able to seek emergency custody of children who want to effect life-altering modifications to their bodies, turning it into what activists proudly deem a “trans-refugee state.” Critics of the bill embraced language similar to what DeSantis’s critics have deployed. “That’s why we call it the ‘Kidnapping Bill,’” Minnesota Family Council director Moses Bratrud told the Washington Examiner.

 

The absence of presidential politics from the equation goes some way to explaining why you might not have heard reporters pound the table over these and other similarly intrusive measures in blue states — some way, but not all the way. If their concerns were truly rooted in child welfare, the reporters objecting to Florida’s statute would also be objecting to Minnesota’s efforts on the same grounds. That they aren’t exposes the degree to which children and their welfare are subordinate to the broader ideological objectives at stake in this national debate.