Children’s National Hospital (CNH) in Washington, D.C. has found itself embroiled in controversy after its staff took a child from his parents and transitioned him, without addressing the child’s obvious mental health needs. A Christian family sued the hospital after they sought help for their autistic teenager who was committing acts of self-harm, and the hospital devoted more energy to transitioning the boy than to helping him.

The family only realized months before that their son (referred to by the pseudonym, “John Doe III” in the lawsuit) was autistic. “He had been showing those symptoms pretty much all his life, but we didn’t recognize that that’s what it was, because he’s so smart,” his father (“John Doe II”) told The Washington Stand. John Doe III learned to read at age four, sprinted through a homeschool education, and started college classes by age 14 “because there was just nothing left to give him.”

The academically brilliant boy was also physically awkward. He “ran robotically,” only learned to ride a bike in his teens, and sometimes developed “quirky” habits like “jumping around in a circle.” Yet he was also able to do normal activities like going to the gym or going fishing. The Doe II family, which had three boys, “spent a majority of our attention … on him because he was so unique,” but “[we] didn’t know it was autism,” his father said. “I didn’t know that there was a such thing as high-functioning autism.”

The Doe II family finally found a running coach who could teach the awkward boy, “someone who was patient,” his father said. Over the summer of 2021, “he got really, really good at it,” so much so that in November Doe III placed fourth in a five-kilometer race with hundreds of participants.

“That was a huge accomplishment, but that also meant the end of his track season,” said Doe II. “And then there was also a girl there who we know he was really close with, and she ended up moving away the next day.” These strains weighed heavily on Doe III, and the next night his parents found him in the bathroom, cutting himself.

After an urgent phone call to the boy’s therapist, Doe II rushed his son to the emergency room at Children’s National Hospital (CNH), where he was admitted under his own name. By the next day, hospital staff were calling John Doe III by a different name and became hostile when John Doe II objected.

After a week — long past the three-day stabilization period Doe III needed following the incident — the hospital convened a virtual “family meeting,” an astonishing euphemism for what followed. The Does invited the boy’s therapist, Tyrone Obaseki, a Christian counselor licensed to practice in multiple states. “I thought that it would just be prudent to have his therapist there,” Doe II explained, “because, once he gets out, he’s going to have a continuity of care. Not that his therapist has to have input … but just so that we can all be on the same page.”

Continuity of care was not on the hospital’s agenda, because they never intended to send the boy back to the care of parents whose beliefs on gender differed from the hospital’s approved dogma, no matter how much or how well they loved their son.

“For several days leading into that meeting, they were telling us not to bring his therapist,” Doe II recalled. “They were vehemently against it. I didn’t know how vehemently until the actual meeting came around. But by this point, I really didn’t trust them anymore because of the early interactions and the fact that he was still in there after a week.”

For the first five to 10 minutes of the meeting, the CNH staff kept demanding that Obaseki leave, but they never provided a good reason for doing so. When pressed for one, they eventually said that the child wouldn’t want him in the meeting. But, when they brought Doe III into the virtual discussion to ask his opinion, the child said Obaseki could stay.

Obaseki remained in the meeting, but he remained silent for its duration. The next day, the CNH staff involved in the call filed a complaint with the Virginia Department of Health Professions, crossing state lines to do so, and alleging that Obaseki was performing illegal conversion therapy on minors. Obaseki was recently cleared of those false allegations, but only after a 10-month investigation.

The remainder of the “family meeting” time was not spent discussing Doe III’s mental and physical health, nor how the parents could watch over and care for him in the comfort and security of their home. Instead, “It really came into focus that it wasn’t about his mental health. They didn’t care about that at all,” lamented Doe II. “It was strictly about gender.”

The CNH staff “tried to frame it from the beginning [as], ‘If you don’t use these pronouns … then we can’t have this meeting,’” Doe II related. “They went into full-on conversion therapy on my wife and me from that point. … Certainly, I wasn’t going to bow to their wishes, but I had to choose my words carefully because I wanted my son back.”

When Doe II tried to get his son transferred to a different hospital for a second opinion, CNH stalled for time while they filed a CPS report full of untrue allegations, which were eventually disproven. In the meantime, however, the Does lost custody of their child, and he was placed in foster care.

CNH staff tried to influence the foster care placement process so that they could still be involved with Doe III after he was discharged from the hospital. He was placed in the home of a woman with an assault record, who was friends with the hospital’s transgender-identifying chaplain.

This woman “affirmed” Doe III in a gender transition, but did not address his other mental health issues. While in her care, Doe III made an attempt on his life, was re-admitted to CNH under a different name, and was discharged back into her care the same day. This foster custodian abruptly canceled an autism testing for Doe III at another hospital in Baltimore, which took a year to schedule, when she learned that the other hospital had required the child’s father to attend. Last year, this foster parent died, and then Doe III immediately began living in the home of CNH’s trans-identifying chaplain.

“It was never about his mental health,” declared Doe II. “They refused to do autism testing. They refuse to do a comprehensive mental health evaluation, which we continually ask for. Whatever coping skills they claim they were giving were inadequate. He seemed worse while he was in there than he was before going in there.” That’s why Mr. and Mrs. John Doe II are fighting to get their son back.