Guess I once again have to link to my post on the Younger family and the guy they’re claiming is “righteous”:
“The father doesn’t follow the recommendations of the counselor or the pediatrician, and he shames her to try to make her feel bad for wanting to dress as a girl,” Meaders, Georgulas’s attorney, told the court. “Even though the father knows she wants super-long hair, he shaves her head when he has the opportunity and leaves the other twin boy’s hair long,” referring to her twin brother Jude.
It is the hair-shaving detail that stands out as especially cruel to trans people and advocates. “Luna’s father has been very insistent on cutting her hair extremely short, and that is like one of my daughter’s biggest dysphoric points,” Jane, a Dallas-area mother of a trans kid who knows Luna (and whose name has been changed for this story) told Vox. “For her, all of this is about the fact that Luna is being forced to have short hair. She doesn’t understand all the other ramifications.”
Luna’s hair figures so prominently in this case because at age 7, hair is often the only differentiating physical indicator of a child’s gender. Clothed, boys’ and girls’ bodies at that age are essentially the same, having not yet undergone any effects from puberty. A trans child at age 7 does not make permanent changes to their body, despite what Younger claims Georgulas wants to do.
The legal battle over Luna — and, ultimately, how she is allowed to identify — reached a tipping point in August 2018 when Georgulas filed for a restraining order against Younger, specifically seeking to prevent him from entering Luna’s school and telling people “that the gender of Luna is different than a girl named Luna.”
In response, Younger petitioned for full conservatorship that same month. Up until this point, he had been allowed to see his kids once a week for two hours and on the first, third, and fifth weekends of each month since 2017, though court testimony indicates he frequently skipped his visitation days. He also launched a social media campaign to “save” his child from the supposed harm of transitioning. For a child of Luna’s age, this is solely social and consists of keeping her hair long, choosing her own clothing, and using a feminine name and pronouns.
However, the conservative campaign spread incorrect fears that Georgulas was seeking to immediately “chemically castrate” the child — a misinformed, scary-sounding reference to hormone medications that would suppress Luna’s testosterone production and replace it with estrogen, which would typically be years in Luna’s future, according to standard medical guidelines. The only plans Georgulas had, according to court transcripts, was to take Luna to a Children’s Health clinic for transgender kids in Dallas. There, they would discuss a plan for potentially starting her on puberty blockers, which are reversible, in the next few years if Luna’s gender dysphoria persists. (The clinic did not return Vox’s requests for comment.)
Seizing on Younger’s narrative of Georgulas manipulating her child, right-wing media outlets like LifeSiteNews and the Daily Wire also accused Georgulas of forcing Luna to be transgender “because she wanted a girl.” But that claim seems rather flimsy because Georgulas has two older daughters from a prior marriage.