Criminalizing Parenthood
Texas Children's Hospital, Houston, TX, Houston Business Journal photo
From Houston’s Children’s Hospital to New Jersey Classrooms:
The Cost of Leaving Parents Out
Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, the largest pediatric hospital in the country, spent years running a gender program for minors. Officials insisted the care stayed within national guidelines and state law—mainly hormone therapy, they said, never the more invasive surgeries that sterilize or permanently alter a child’s body. Whistleblowers told a different story: puberty blockers given to children as young as eleven, hormone implants, continued interventions after the hospital publicly claimed it had paused the work, and records that raised questions about billing. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton investigated for years. In 2026 the hospital settled. It agreed to pay $10 million, permanently remove the privileges of five doctors involved in the interventions, and stop all “sex-rejecting” procedures on minors. As part of the same deal, it will open what officials call the nation’s first dedicated detransition clinic—offering endocrinology, surgery, fertility counseling, psychotherapy, and related services free of charge for the first five years to patients who received transition-related care before age 21.
The hospital denied wrongdoing and said it settled only to end costly litigation. Yet the outcome is hard to ignore. An institution that participated in medicalizing children’s gender distress—and that collected payment for that care—is now positioned to treat the very people who later regret it. The same system that helped move children onto a medical pathway will now be paid, at least initially through its own funds and later through the ordinary channels of healthcare billing, to help some of them try to reverse course. That is not accountability. It is a closed loop.
Parents in New Jersey are watching a parallel process play out in public schools. State guidance, widely adopted by districts as Policy 5756, tells schools to accept a student’s asserted gender identity. Parental consent is not required. There is no affirmative duty to notify parents when a child begins using a different name or pronouns at school, or when staff facilitate a social transition. In practice, this has meant schools can treat a girl as a boy—or a boy as a girl—while carefully using the child’s legal name and birth-sex pronouns only when speaking to the family. The child’s double life is protected by policy.
In Cherry Hill, one of South Jersey’s larger districts, father Frederick Short sued over exactly this arrangement. The district’s policy, modeled on state guidance, allows preferred names and pronouns without parental consent or notification. Short argued that the rule excludes parents from fundamental decisions about their children’s identity and mental health. The case has continued through federal court with additional parties and motions.
Further north, near the Delaware River, Christin Heaps sued Delaware Valley Regional High School after staff began using a male name and pronouns for his daughter and refused to stop even after he objected. The district cited the same state-backed policy. Heaps’ case reached the Third Circuit. Multiple states and parental-rights organizations filed briefs supporting him. The core dispute remains the same: can a public school socially transition a minor while keeping the parents in the dark?
These are not abstract policy fights. They are about who decides when a child is in distress. Adolescence is hard. Bodies change. Peers influence. Online communities can accelerate confusion. When schools and hospitals treat a sudden declaration of transgender identity as settled fact—and treat parents as potential obstacles rather than the primary guardians—they remove the very people best positioned to know the child’s history, mental health struggles, and possible underlying issues. The result is a medical or social pathway that is easy to enter and far harder to leave.
Texas Children’s Hospital is now building a clinic to treat the consequences of the pathway it once advanced. New Jersey schools continue to operate under rules that keep parents at arm’s length while staff affirm a child’s new identity in real time. The pattern is the same: institutions step between parent and child, accelerate a profound change, and then offer themselves as the solution when the change produces regret or harm.
Parents are not the enemy of their children’s well-being. They are the first line of protection. When hospitals and schools decide otherwise—and especially when they later profit from cleaning up the results—families have every right to demand transparency, notification, and the chance to slow things down before irreversible steps are taken. The children at the center of these decisions will live with the outcomes for decades. They deserve better than a system that treats them as both patients and future customers.
This is not just a New Jersey problem; this is a nationwide problem. The woke education system that has been so prevalent since the establishment of the Department of Education under Jimmy Carter seems to ignore that puberty is a natural part of human development by working to make puberty the problem. By making puberty the problem, they are criminalizing parenthood and putting a barrier between the parents and their own children. In New Jersey, this is happening by using policies like 5756 and proposed mental health laws like S2915 and A1801, which would allow children to consent to mental health treatment at the age of 14 without parental consent or notification. This bill is currently in the New Jersey legislature.