SB 107 and Custody Jurisdiction
There is this bill, SB 107, circulating in California.
If it passes, it will affect CUSTODY rights of parents in other states.
Kidnapping Hypothetical
Hypo: Mom and Dad have custody orders in Texas, granting Mom sole custody of 10 year old minor, who has sexual identity confusion. The Texas courts have already found Dad unfit. Dad does not care about minor child, he just doesn’t want to pay child support.
If SB 107 passes, Dad can escape these orders and take minor child to California for “gender affirming care”.
Dad would end up with sole custody, even though Texas has already found him unfit! SB 107 would allow California to IGNORE Texas orders, and make new orders as long as minor is here for “gender affirming care”.
“Gender affirming care” includes sterilizing puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and trans surgeries.
SB 107 Allows Parents to Violate Custody Orders If For “Gender Affirming Care”
The changes to UCCJEA, proposed by SB107, will allow Dad to violate the Texas custody order by taking minor child to California for “gender affirming care”.
In other words, parental rights in ALL 50 states (not just California) will be stripped!
Senate Bill 107
Read Senate Bill 107 here.
Senator Scott Wiener introduced SB 107 to turn California into a “refuge state for transgender children”.
Some states have banned minors from receiving “gender affirming care”, and other states like Texas have enacted laws labeling these treatments as child abuse. Read Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s 13-page statement explaining why he thinks trans drugs and mastectomies on healthy minors violate Texas child abuse statutes.
Jurisdictional issues are a nightmare in litigation. SB 107 is a dangerous bill that will enable and encourage predators and kidnappers to defy custody orders.
UCCJEA
Let’s talk about the UCCJEA, the Uniform Child Custody and Jurisdiction Act. 49 states and DC have adopted it. (Massachusetts has not).
The purpose of the UCCJEA is to provide a uniform law regarding jurisdiction in child custody cases.
As you all well know, laws differ in all 50 states. Thus, depending on which state you are in, you may have different outcomes because the laws are different.
Can you imagine if custody litigants can just flee a custody order from a state and go to a new state? Imagine all the kidnapping of children in divorce/separation cases!
The whole purpose of the UCCJEA is to prevent against this type of abuse.
UCCJEA Determines Which State has the Power to Make Custody Orders
The UCCJEA is about jurisdiction. It specifies which court should decide a custody case, not how the court should decide the case.
Under UCCJEA, Courts Must Enforce Custody Orders of Other Courts
The UCCJEA requires family law courts around this country to enforce custody and visitation orders that were entered in other states. This prevents parents from “kidnapping” their children to escape custody orders entered in their state.
If you have a child custody order from Los Angeles County, California, this order is still enforceable everywhere. Unless we have another civil war, other state courts MUST legally enforce valid custody orders entered in all other states.
In general, under UCCJEA, “Home State” of Child Gets to Make Orders
In general, the home state of the child is where he/she has resided within the past 6 months.
Under the UCCJEA, the “home state” gets to make orders.
There are of course exceptions, such as in “temporary emergency” situations, or where circumstances arise where there is no clear “home state”.
SB 107 Will Amend the CA Family Code, Allowing California to Be “Home State” to Make Orders
Under SB 107, California becomes the “home state” with initial child custody jurisdiction if a child is here for gender affirming care.
See Paragraph 4 of the 8/30/2022 Senate Floor Analyses
4) Provides that the presence of a child in this state for the purpose of obtaining gender-affirming health care or gender-affirming mental health care is sufficient to grant a court in this state the jurisdiction to make an initial child custody determination for the child.
SB 107 Creates a “Temporary Emergency Situation” for California to Assert Jurisdiction
Paragraph 5 of the 8/30/2022 Senate Floor Analyses:
5) Provides that a court of this state has temporary emergency jurisdiction over a child if the child is present in the state because the child has been unable to obtain gender-affirming health care or gender-affirming mental health care.
This means California courts will be given “temporary emergency jurisdiction” over any child who lives in or travels to California, allowing them to receive harmful interventions without parental consent.
This severe government overreach violates federal law regarding jurisdiction over custody matters, as well as the laws of the 49 other states! It will basically do away with the UCCJEA as long as it’s “gender affirming care!”
Extremely unconstitutional!
The Horrors of SB 107
A legal analysis from Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) explains:
SB 107 violates parental rights protected by the U.S. Constitution by giving California courts the ability to strip parents who reside in another state of their parental rights if their child travels to California to obtain gender transition procedures – including harmful puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and irreversible surgeries. It also denies parents the right to have access to their child’s medical information.
ADF goes on to explain different scenarios where children and families could be harmed by the bill:
- An unfit parent about to lose custody could travel to California with the child, give the child puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones, and in doing so win custody under SB 107, even if the home-state court has already entered judgment on the case.
- Parents whose child visits a relative in California could lose custody of their child forever if the relative persuades the child to identify as a different gender during the visit.
- Parents of children who never travel to California could be denied medical information about their child if the child obtains puberty blockers from a doctor in California via telemedicine.
Watch the Hearing on SB 107
SB 107 Asm. Hearing to Make CA a Sanctuary for Minor Who Want Trans-Drugs/Surgery
Research Shows 80-95% Gender Dysphoria is Temporary/Gender Affirming Care Increases Risk for Suicide
The American College of Pediatricians’ found that 80 to 95 percent of children who suffer from gender dysphoria will eventually re-identify with their biological sex. The Heritage foundation also conducted a study which found increased access to gender “affirming” care doesn’t improve mental health outcomes. It only increases a child’s risk for suicide.
De-Transitioner Chloe Cole Testifies Against SB 107
Chloe Cole, a 17-year-old detransitioner, spoke out against Scott Wiener’s California bill SB107.
Here is her testimony.
Transcript of Chloe Cole’s Testimony
My name is Chloe Cole. I’m 18 and my story is not hyperbole. Starting around the age of 12, I began to believe that I was transgender. This belief was not organic. All the media I consumed as a kid showed me how stupid and vulnerable being a girl was. All the sexualized images of women gave me an unrealistic expectation of womanhood. I spent a lot of time online and quickly saw all the praise coming out as trans got on Instagram and other social media. I was a bit awkward in school and had some trouble making friends. Like many dysphoric children, I also suffer from a variety of mental health conditions, so I easily fell prey to the narrative that if I felt different and did not want to be a highly sexualized girl, that I must be a boy.
I obsessed over becoming a boy. I believed that all of my insecurities and anxiety would magically disappear once I transitioned. The mental health professionals did not try to dissuade me of this delusional belief. I was fast-tracked into medical transition after I was diagnosed with dysphoria. In California, a child can pick their gender identity and a care provider questioning that would be considered conversion therapy. This wasn’t a misdiagnosis, it was mistreatment.
“No one explored why I did not want to be girl.”
My parents were told that the options were transition or suicide. They complied because they were not offered any other treatment solution for my distress. My distraught parents wanted me alive, so they listened to my doctors. I was placed on puberty blockers, testosterone after expressing my gender dysphoria to my therapist and I was approved for a double mastectomy all by the age of 15. No one explored why I did not want to be girl.
More and more kids are falling for the false promise of happiness if they transition. Gender clinics in the US are turning a blind eye to European countries, who are pumping the brakes on this experiment on youth.
Who here really believes that, as a 15-year-old, I should have had my healthy breasts removed or that it should’ve been an option? When the CDPH got less than 300 reports of people getting hospitalized as a result of vaping, San Francisco banned vape products that same year, so I know that you care about the health of children, yet you are allowing doctors all over the state to remove the healthy breasts of children.
How many more children’s bodies will be destroyed before you actually listen? What is the sweet spot? 100? 200? 1000?
“SB107 will open the flood gates for confused children like me to get the gender interventions that many so regret. I am the canary in the coal mine.”
If Passed, SB 107 Will Attack Rights of Parents in ALL 50 States
Matthew McReynolds, a senior attorney with the Pacific Justice Institute, says it best in his letter opposing SB 107.
SB 107 “takes a flying leap over the precipice,” McReynolds explained. “Actually declaring that it will welcome and protect kidnappers—including parents who have been adjudicated as unstable and unfit to care for their children—as long as the adult absconding with the child says they are doing so to put the child into gender-hormone therapy or some other, Orwellian gender-affirming care.”
“Of all the implications noted above, the last (Section 7 of the Bill) is the most potent and the most egregious. This
provision creates an exception to kidnapping laws that is beyond the pale even in progressive California. In its overzealousness to punish states like Texas, this Bill will instead empower predators.
“SB 107 may be the most brazen assault on fundamental parental rights in the history of this state,” McReynolds warned. “This is not a game, a spoof, or a joke. Families who thought they had escaped California will not be safe if this bill is enacted. It is time for citizens to call their legislators en masse to let them know they will be swept out of office this November if this bill passes.”
If SB 107 Passes, California Will Have Jurisdiction Over Children in ALL 50 States; Litigation Everywhere
This is absolutely crazy. SB 107 doesn’t just erase the rights of California parents. Parental rights in ALL states will be affected.
California Family Council President Jonathan Keller called SB 107 “one of the gravest threats to parental rights in recent years.”
Keller said if the bill is signed, “California should brace for lawsuits. Other states’ Attorneys General will not sit idly by as California steals children from parents who don’t want them sterilized with these trans-treatments.”
Implore Governor Newsom to Veto SB 107
Please share this on Twitter and social media. Implore Newsom to veto this dangerous bill. Call him at 916-445-2841!
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