Children’s National Hospital Took, Transitioned Child as Parents Fought for His Long-Term Best Interest

A Christian couple has sued Children’s National Hospital (CNH) in Washington, D.C. after the hospital took away their autistic, teenage son and nudged him into a gender transition. Throughout the process, the parents (referred to pseudonymously as Mr. and Mrs. John Doe II) fought for the best interest of their child (John Doe III), while the hospital’s decision-making can only be described as bizarre.

It was a night no parent wants to live through — and no parent can forget. The Does woke up to find their teenage son cutting himself in the bathroom. They urgently called a Christian therapist who had seen the boy before, and he recommended they take their son to CNH, not suspecting the “nightmare” that would ensue.

Mr. Doe II took his son from their Temple Hills, Md. home to the CNH emergency room in northwest D.C. “Later that night, maybe eight hours later or so, they took him into the back where they said that he [would be] until they [could] get a bed,” Mr. Doe II told The Washington Stand. Hospital staff informed him that “typically … kids are there for three days or so to stabilize them,” at which point he “left to go to work the next day.” After all, in the real world, ordinary people have to go to work.

Unbeknownst to Mr. Doe II, an ominous question during in-processing foreshadowed the much longer wait to come. “Once we got in” to the emergency room, Doe II recalled, “they asked, ‘What would you like to be called?’ And of course, [John Doe III] just gave his regular name. [There was] no other name that we knew of. And they wrote that down.”

The next day after work, Doe II intended to drive the roughly 40 minutes back to the hospital to see his son and “to bring him some clothes, because he’s going to be there for a couple of days.” On his way, he got a call from Paige Johnson, a social worker with CNH. “She’s using this other name, and I didn’t know who she was talking about. I thought she had the wrong number,” said Doe II.

After “a good three minutes or so, she began to get a little hostile. And then I realized what was going on. I said, ‘I don’t know this name. We don’t call him by that name. It would be respectful for you to just call him by his given name’” — the given name that Doe III shares with his father and grandfather.

“She flat out told me, ‘No,’” Doe II recalled. “And from that point forward, they were pretty much hostile toward us.”

Doe III remained in the hospital much longer than three days. Staff at CNH refused to release him back into his parents’ care unless they agreed to modify their Christian faith to affirm LGBT identities. Days turned into weeks, and “they started suggesting ridiculous things to us. They tried to get us to go meet with their transgender chaplain. They really wanted to convert us, and they refused to let [our son] go unless we let him do some things that were LGBTQ,” Doe II related.

“I wouldn’t do that,” he declared. “I still love my son. And to this day, all I want is him back. But I don’t have to agree in this area to love my child. … They were, behind the scenes, telling him the opposite … based on the way things tended to play out.”

But Doe III’s hospital stay had extended so long that it was affecting other aspects of his life. “He was in college at the time” — the young prodigy began taking college classes at age 14 — but “he had been in … the hospital so long that, his grades were going to slip, and he was going to fail all his classes,” Doe II explained. “We started pretty much begging them, ‘Give us a note to give to his professors, so that he doesn’t fail his classes. He’s about to graduate with his associate’s degree and move on to the University of Maryland in engineering.’”

Given the two options — have a kid fail his classes and fail to graduate because he’s in the hospital or sign a doctor’s note — it’s clear which one is in the child’s best interest. Yet the doctor’s note from CNH was not forthcoming. “Paige Johnson was the main point of contact at that point, and she refused to do it. She kept saying she would do it, but a week passed, and she hadn’t done it,” said Doe II. Was this a subtle form of manipulation to leverage the parents’ care for their child’s academic success against their religious convictions? We’ll likely never know.

Meanwhile, Doe II continued, “His professors gave me a deadline. So, we ended up finding someone above [Johnson] … finally got in touch with that person, and then almost immediately she went ahead and sent the letter over.”

By this point, the Does had become convinced that CNH was not the best place for their son. “They’re not helping him there. And this is adversarial. We want to send him somewhere else,” ran their thinking. Doe II located another facility and hired a medical transport.

That’s when CNH truly began to hit below the belt. “They tried to gaslight me and told me, ‘Well, it’ll be 24 to 48 hours and so on and so forth. You can come back, and we can have him out-processed, and he can go with you,’” Doe II recalled. “Instead … they wrote a nasty letter to CPS, Child Protective Services, with all types of lies about us. And CPS then took supposedly temporary custody of him so that we could not move him to another facility. About 10 or 11 days after that … they took him into foster care.”

During a meeting with CPS and hospital staff “that they were going to try to use in court against us,” said Doe II, “they kept referring to him by this new name.” So he asked what name the hospital used when they billed the parents’ insurance for their son’s expenses. Another social worker, Sarah Miller, responded, “We call him by his dead name.”

“It was like a punch in the gut right there,” reflected Doe II. “I am the second, and my son is the third. So obviously my father was the original one with his name. So it’s three generations of his name … our history.”

“You call his name dead?” asked Doe II, as he recalled the exchange. Miller replied, “Well, his name hasn’t been changed yet legally. So, we use his dead name.” Doe II pressed further, “What is a dead name?” After hemming and hawing, Miller admitted, “It’s a legal name.” So, “why didn’t you just say his legal name from the beginning?” Doe II wanted to know. “Why did you have to say that? It was really just to cause injury. It was just more of the point of them being adversarial.”

Staff with CNH also appeared to intervene in the placement of Doe III within the foster system. Miller “told the people at the CPS that she wants to be involved with him after he leaves her custody,” described Doe II. “My wife and I are like, ‘Why? Why does she want to be involved with him after he leaves her custody?’ He’s no longer in the hospital.”

Doe II doesn’t know for sure whether the CNH staff had a say in the foster care placement of his son. But he does know that his son was placed in the care of “a lady with an assault record” who “turns out to be friends with this transgender chaplain” at CNH.

This presents yet another clear choice. Given the two options — placing a minor in the care of loving but non-LGBT-affirming parents or placing him in a foster home where his caretaker had an assault record — the best interest of the child should be clear. But CNH could only view the case through rainbow-colored glasses.

“Under that foster parent connected to Defendant’s chaplain, over the first seven months of 2022, John Doe III wound up being tested for sexually transmitted diseases, displayed on social media platform Instagram in provocative poses, and eventually [placed] in the hospital for a suicide attempt by the end of July 2022,” according to the lawsuit.

The hospital did not inform the Does directly that their son was readmitted to the hospital after making a suicide attempt while in foster care, Doe II said. They only learned about it because it came out during CPS court hearings, which dragged on for nearly a year. Also, in contrast to CNH’s “typical” procedure for stabilizing children, which they had earlier told Doe II involved a three-day stay, the hospital released his son back into the custody of the foster parents on the same day “because she was gender-affirming,” he said.

The hospital also did not inform the Does when their sons’ foster caretaker suddenly died in 2023, which resulted in their son living in the home of the hospital’s transgender chaplain. The chaplain’s connection to the foster care system is uncertain — is he an approved caretaker, for instance? — and another odd intervention by hospital staff against the child’s best interest.

Since the time their son was placed with CPS, the Does have not been allowed to have regular contact with him — even after being cleared of any wrongdoing. No phone calls, no holidays, no birthdays. “I have no idea what’s going on. I don’t know what type of brainwashing [he has undergone], if he has Stockholm syndrome, if they’re abusing him. I don’t know if they trafficked him even further.”

That worst-case scenario is not the product of an over-active imagination or something Mr. Doe II invented out of thin air. In 2021, a Virginia high schooler was sexually trafficked twice — first across D.C. and Maryland, then to Texas — after a judge refused to restore her to her parents’ custody because they were not LGBT-affirming. Her sad story inspired model legislation, called “Sage’s Law,” to protect other vulnerable minors from being sexually exploited and trafficked across state lines. However, it has not yet passed in Maryland, Virginia, or the District of Columbia.

Doe II has providentially encountered his son on three occasions after CPS got involved. He once met him as he was “coming out of the eye doctor,” where he was able to “say, ‘I love you’ and get a hug from him,” despite the presence of a “CPS bodyguard.” He met him again at the eye doctor — both had rescheduled their appointments from the first time — but after 20 seconds, the foster mom, who was present (before her death), “threw a hissy fit and pulled him out.”

The third time Doe II met his son was at an autism test at Mount Washington Hospital in Baltimore. “We’d been waiting about a year to get this test,” said Doe II, “because the testing would have guaranteed him accommodations when he went to the four-year college.” As he no longer had custody of his son, Doe II only attended because the hospital required that he be there to fill out a questionnaire.

Doe II ran into the foster mom with his son and told her that the hospital required him to be there, but he didn’t want to cause trouble and would keep his distance. But she “went upstairs, created some kind of commotion, and canceled his autism testing.” Doe II can only assume she said that his son didn’t need it, even though they had waited a year to get the test.

“I would gladly have stayed home if I could guarantee he would have been able to get that test,” Doe II reflected sadly.

Doe II asks Christians to pray “that my son is restored and returned to us. I don’t know what damage has been done, but I pray that it’s minimal and that he’s delivered from whatever the hospital is doing to him.” He also wants Christians to pray for victory against the destructive transgender ideology. “My ultimate hope for this is that we can finally have one of these cases reach the Supreme Court, and they can make a decision on this thing for parental rights, to stop butchering our children.”