Massachusetts is the latest state to interfere with custody when parents refuse to affirm their child’s preferred gender or consent to gender-transition procedures.
Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, D, is defending the removal of a 15-year-old girl from her Catholic parents amid an ongoing battle over parental authority, allegations of abuse, and the family’s claim that the state is facilitating the girl’s gender transition against their wishes.
Joseph and Arlene Kutzko say that a school counselor at Algonquin Regional High School encouraged their daughter, Sophie, to socially transition into a boy without their knowledge or consent. The counselor then reported them to the Department of Children and Family (DCF). Their daughter was taken from their custody in January 2025 and placed in a boys’ dormitory. According to the Kutzkos’ attorney, Bernadette Broyless with the Child & Parental Rights Campaign, the couple have not been allowed to visit or communicate with Sophie since then, but they desperately trying to fight the state’s efforts to administer the male hormone testosterone to their now 17-year-old daughter.
Healey insists that her state did not remove the girl because of gender identity or “gender-affirming care,” but because criminal charges had been filed against her parents. The family’s attorneys dispute that account.
Although both parents faced criminal charges stemming from allegations involving their daughter, neither was found guilty, and Broyless maintains that the state’s allegations of physical and sexual abuse are unsupported. The parents say that their refusal to affirm their daughter’s transgender identity has remained central to the state’s involvement with their family.
The Massachusetts case is not occurring in isolation. Similar conflicts across the country are raising a fundamental question about the relationship between parents and the state: Can the state actually take children from their parents because they refuse to bow down to transgender ideology?
A basic truth existed long before any government or state agency was established: Children are not products of the state. They are a heritage from the Lord, entrusted by God to their mothers and fathers, who therefore have the divine duty and primary authority to love, care for, and protect them, as well as to direct their upbringing, medical care, and moral formation.
Today, however, state agencies are separating children from loving and faithful families when parents refuse to affirm their children’s preferred gender identities or consent to “gender-affirming care.”
A Growing Pattern of State-Sanctioned Interference
The ideological gatekeeping taking place in Massachusetts constitutes an open religious test and has already drawn challenges in federal court.
Massachusetts is by no means alone in following this trend. In Montana, Todd and Krista Kolstad lost custody of their 14-year-old daughter after opposing her social gender transition while she was receiving medical treatment. The state’s child protective services intervened and placed the girl in an out-of-state psychiatric facility over her parents’ objections.
A similar case took place at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., where a Christian family says their autistic teenage son was kept in the hospital and encouraged to socially transition. After the parents held to their beliefs and asked that their son be called by his legal name and sent home, hospital staff allegedly reported the family to Child Protective Services. The state then took temporary custody of the boy and placed him in a foster home, removing his parents’ legal authority to oversee his care.
The Terror of Ideological Overreach
The situation in these states involves an alarming extension of government power that directly contradicts Scripture, Supreme Court precedent, and the principles of natural law. God has placed children in families, not in governments.
Proverbs 22:6 puts the responsibility on parents to “train up a child in the way he should go.” When the state intervenes to override a parent’s moral and medical judgment concerning a child’s bodily integrity, it commits a serious injustice against both God and the family.
The state usually bases its argument on the assertion that refusing to affirm a child’s gender identity amounts to causing immediate harm. Yet the clinical evidence and assessments by medical bodies around the world have raised serious concerns about puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, including risks involving fertility and bone density, as well as uncertainty about long-term psychological outcomes. By pushing parents out of the decision-making process, state agencies risk handing vulnerable young people over to a medical system that may leave them with ongoing side effects and dependent on lifelong pharmaceutical treatment.
The threat goes beyond medical decision-making, as it places religious families in an increasingly hostile position. When traditional biblical views on sex and gender are treated as evidence that parents are unfit, the state effectively establishes an unofficial orthodoxy based on gender ideology and penalizes those who refuse to accept it.
Restoring Parental Authority
Fortunately, recent legal cases show that federal courts still recognize basic constitutional protections for parental authority.
In Mahmoud v. Taylor, the U.S. Supreme Court secured a significant victory for religious freedom and the rights of parents. The Court held that parents were entitled to an injunction allowing them to opt their children out of instruction involving LGBTQ-themed storybooks because the policy substantially burdened their religious exercise.
The Court reaffirmed the longstanding principle that parents have a First Amendment right to guide their children’s religious upbringing and that the government cannot unnecessarily burden that right as a condition of public education.
The fundamental lesson from Mahmoud v. Taylor should now be applied in medical and custody cases across the country. If parents have a constitutional right to protect their children from classroom instruction that substantially interferes with their religious upbringing, surely their rights deserve at least as much protection when the dispute involves life-altering medical procedures.
It is absurd to recognize a parent’s right to protect a child from classroom instruction but withdraw those parental rights when a social worker or doctor recommends puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgical procedures. Neither the medical profession nor the state owns our children, and neither is more entitled to decide a child’s health or future than the parents whom God has appointed to care for them.
As the body of Christ, we must speak with clarity and courage. The struggle for our children is also a spiritual battle over God’s design for humanity and the structure of the family.
The government did not create the family, and the government has no right to tear it apart. It is time for faithful Americans to stand together. Our children belong to God, and we must not surrender them to the state.
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