In Montana, Child Protective Services took custody of a teenage girl because her parents refused to comply with a hospital’s determination to re-gender her. In New York, the court refused a father’s efforts to stop his son’s mother from giving their child life-altering feminizing hormones. In Texas, a father fought the courts unsuccessfully for years to save his son from being chemically castrated. How is this happening? Well, one of the ways is to redefine what constitutes “child abuse.” Legislatures are openly trying to do this redefinition, while other branches of government, less accountable than the legislature, are flexing their muscles to do the same.

At least since the mid-19th century in America, the concept of “child abuse” has had a generally understood meaning. If you’d ask the person on the street what the term meant, people would have said such things as beating, sexually abusing, or starving a child. There were fights around the margins (e.g., is “spanking” a form of beating or an acceptable type of discipline?), but people generally understood that child abuse meant ignoring or destroying a child’s physical integrity, inflicting pain, or putting the child’s life at risk.

That’s why, for decades, there’s been little argument about child abuse laws. We know it when we see it, and those parents and guardians who violate the norms deserve criminal consequences for their actions.

But what happens when the left gets Orwellian control of the language? What happens when it redefines entirely what constitutes “child abuse”? That’s what we’re seeing with the push to force mutilating surgeries and dangerous hormone treatments on ever younger children, all in the name of so-called “gender-affirming care.”

Image: California’s pushing back against redefining child abuse. YouTube screen grab (cropped).

In some cases, the effort to redefine what constitutes child abuse is taking place in the open. For example, California recently passed a law that a parent who, during a custody battle, does not support his child’s supposed “transition” to the opposite sex (as if that were possible) has committed a form of child abuse that justifies his losing custody. The only reason the law failed was that Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has an eye on the White House, vetoed it lest it harm the so-called transgender community. The important point is that Democrats in California are openly redefining “child abuse.”

The Maine legislature currently has before it a bill that does exactly the same: A court can take “emergency jurisdiction” of a child if one of the parents in a divorce does not recognize the child’s allegedly newfound gender.

At least these states are acting through elected representatives who are theoretically accountable to voters. What’s more insidious is when the medical community, Child Protective Services, or the judicial system, none of which are directly answerable to voters, do the same. (In some regions, judges are elected but, for the most part, judges have very little connection to voters.)

In the Montana case, the parents lost custody of a teenage daughter who has a history of mental illness when Child Protective Services snatched her and hospitalized her, and the hospital insisted that her new identity as a boy had to be recognized. When the parents refused to do so, CPS put the child in a care home in Wyoming and then transferred her to her mother, who lives in Canada, a nation that has gone absolutely insane with gender madness. It took a father years to appeal successfully a jail sentence in British Columbia for the “crime” of “misgendering” his daughter.

Meanwhile, in Texas, Jeff Younger unsuccessfully battled for years to keep his ex-wife and her gender-obsessed child therapist pal from turning one of his sons into a girl. When Texas lawmakers started paying attention to what the courts were doing, the mother de-camped to California. There, anything goes when it comes to slicing and dicing children’s bodies and filling them with dangerous hormones that sterilize them, bring about cancer and heart disease, destroy their bones, and change the children’s fundamental natures. Heck, even the New York Times just published an opinion piece about the physical and mental dangers to children from these procedures.

Most recently, New York family court judges denied a father the right to prevent his wife from putting his 8-year-old son on hormones that will allegedly, and magically, change the boy into a girl.

As you may have noticed, there are three constants in these cases. Each case involves a divorce scenario with an ugly custody battle. In addition, one will almost invariably find either girls who have long histories of mental illness or mothers who insist that their sons are, in fact, daughters.

Regarding the latter, back in 1991, when such studies were still allowed in academia, the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry discovered that when they looked at the mothers of boys with what was still properly called “gender identity disorder,” 53% of these mothers had Borderline Personality Disorder. Fifty-three percent! (Disclaimer: I have no way of knowing whether the mothers involved in the cases I’ve cited above have any psychological problems and am not saying that they do.)

Once child abuse meant that a sane society protected children from insane people—that is, people who thought it was okay to destroy a child’s body and spirit. Now, the insane people are defining what constitutes child abuse and, when legislatures cannot make it happen, relatively unaccountable organizations, such as the courts, hospitals, or alleged child protective agencies, are doing the redefinitions themselves.