Why It’s Probably Not A Coincidence That The Mother Transing Her 7-Year-Old Isn’t Biologically Related

The story of seven-year-old James, whom his mother has pressured to become “Luna,” has been all over my newsfeed. The messy custody battle deserves every second of our click-bait-prone attention: Jeffrey Younger, James’s father, wants to keep his son’s body intact, while Anne Georgulas, James’s mother, wants to allow for “treatment” that would physically and chemically castrate him.

The havoc that divorce wreaks in a child’s life is mainstage in this tragic case. Most of us children of divorce quickly learn to act one way with mom and another way with dad. We can switch to a different set of rules, diet, family members, bedtime, screen time limits, and political convictions in that 20-minute ride from mom’s house to dad’s.

Unfortunately for little James, the adaptation he had to make went far beyond meat-lover’s pizza at dad’s house and cauliflower crusts at mom’s: it meant losing one of the most sacred aspects of his identity—his maleness. His dad loved him as a boy, so he got to be himself when he was at dad’s house. But mom showered love on the version of James she preferred, the one with the imaginary vagina.

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