On The Pro America Report: Is James one step closer to being Luna

A pivotal decision has been made in the Younger case from Texas.

Screenshot from a 2021 hearing in the Younger case

I was back on with Ed Martin on the Pro America Report.

We discussed the latest update in the Younger case from Texas, along with big tech executives getting preferential treatment in court.

The Younger case has become the main flash point in the trans debate when it comes to family court.

At stake is the gender of the son of Jeff Younger and Anne Georgolous.

Anne wants their son to become a girl and Jeff disagrees.

This case has dragged on for years, and while Anne has won most of the battles, Jeff has been able to stop her from actually making the transition from boy to girl.

Below Ann describes how this came about.

To paraphrase, when James was three, he wanted to pretend to be a girl, and by the time he was five, he didn’t want to pretend any more.

This case has captured the public’s attention in part because Anne has largely won in court and continues to inch closer to actually transitioning their son.

She has won sole physical and legal custody of their son, but the court has included in those orders language which requires both parents to agree to any surgery to actually change gender.

The latest development has Anne moving with James- or Luna- to California.

This may be important because California has SB 107 Gender-affirming health care.

Some have called it an amnesty for the State of California, to protect parents from legal responsibility after having gender change operations.

This had Jeff Younger worried- SB 107 took effect at the beginning of 2023- and he appealed his ex-wife’s move all the way to the Texas Supreme Court.

The Texas Supreme Court denied his petition and argued that his concern about SB 107 were unfounded.

The Texas Supreme Court argues that SB 107 protects people getting gender change operations from laws in other states, but in this case, there is a court order, not merely a law, which bars mom from having this surgery.

California ignoring this order would violate the Full Faith and Credit Clause.

Ed and I talked about this, and I mentioned something similar: the Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act (UCCJEA). The UCCJEA requires, among other things, that orders in any US jurisdiction be honored in all other jurisdictions.

This would seem to protect James and keep him a boy but does it.

According to a Reuters analysis, it may not.

A spokesperson in Senator Wiener’s office told Reuters Fact Check in an email, “SB 107 doesn’t give courts (new) authority to take custody from parents of minors seeking gender-affirming care. All the bill does is provide guidance to courts about hearing cases where they already are allowed to do so under California law.”

One part of the legislation is devoted to clarifying California courts’ jurisdiction – the authority to hear and decide – in family law cases, including custody claims, that involve people and agencies in multiple states and “arising as a result of a minor receiving gender-affirming care” in California, according to an Aug. 29 legal analysis of the bill’s contents by the state’s Senate Judiciary Committee (here).

Regarding custody, the bill “revises” existing rules for handling family law matters between states, known as the “Uniform Child Custody Jurisdiction and Enforcement Act,” to provide California courts “jurisdictional guidance,” according to the analysis.

When minors are in the state for gender-affirming care they cannot receive elsewhere, the bill says that the situation falls into an existing category of “emergencies” that give California courts clear jurisdiction: “a court of this state has temporary emergency jurisdiction over a child if the child is present in the state because the child has been unable to obtain gender-affirming health care or gender-affirming mental health care.”

According to the analysis, SB 107 may indeed do exactly what the Texas Supreme Court claims it won’t do.