Splitting families apart

A Catholic Massachusetts couple is fighting to regain custody of their teenage daughter, whom they have not been allowed to see for approaching two years. Joseph and Arlene Kutzko say their daughter Sophie was “the devoutest of devout Catholics” until, they believe, her high school drove a wedge between her and them, encouraging her transgender identity.

Then, in January 2025, the Department of Children and Families (DCF) took custody of her on the same day Joseph was arrested on Sophie’s allegation of verbal and physical abuse. But a month later, the abuse charge was dropped as “unfounded” and replaced with a new charge: “neglect.”

Neglect of what, exactly? By the Kutzkos’ account, the state has yet to make the charge precise. Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey has insisted that their resistance to Sophie’s gender identity is immaterial to the case. Meanwhile, a judge has had to block the DCF from giving Sophie testosterone treatment. We think the governor doth protest too much.

Sophie’s high school has denied that they went behind her parents’ back in affirming her transgender identity. This is dubious, since the Kutzkos know she was receiving “counseling” in precisely the months when she became more disconnected from them. It would have been legal for the school to deceive them, and there is precedent for such deception in the state’s school system. Numerous other schools across the country have done the same.

As for whether Sophie was truthfully reporting abuse or inventing an excuse to break away from her parents, further reporting on the case quotes the judge’s reference to “three prior restraining orders against Kutzko, one of which is permanent.” No details have been provided there, but public court records do show that the same Joseph Kutzko has a prior violation of an abuse prevention order going all the way back to 2015. We should admit this background history adds a murky layer over the alleged 2025 “incident,” in which Sophie claimed Joseph punched her, pulled her hair, and threatened to kill her for singing out of key at a birthday party. From a journalistic standpoint, we lack the complete evidential picture to say definitively where the truth lies. However, we reemphasize that the DCF itself didn’t think the allegation was worth pressing, and yet it retains custody of Sophie anyway.

This matters, because it illustrates just how easy it would be for a young gender-confused person to invent an abuse story that triggers a series of events separating her from her parents, regardless of whether the state ends up finding the abuse claim well-founded. Where “gender affirmation” is normalized as simply another form of medical care, parental resistance will naturally be regarded as a form of “neglect.” What else could the term plausibly refer to here? We have already seen how Massachusetts deems prospective foster parents unfit based on how well they comply (or don’t) with LGBTQ indoctrination. The governor’s insistence that this case has nothing to do with the clash over the child’s gender confusion, nothing at all, simply won’t wash.

We can point to many other cases where a parent’s desire has been overruled by the state here. Perhaps the most high-profile of these horror stories was Texas father Jeff Younger’s losing fight for his son James, whose mother (Younger’s ex-wife) wanted him to undergo “gender-affirming care” in California. In 2024, a Los Angeles Superior Court judge stripped Younger of all parental rights over both James and his brother, even the right to unsupervised visitation.

But there have been other, less-covered stories too. In 2021, an autistic 16-year-old boy was diagnosed with gender dysphoria at Washington D.C.’s Children’s National Hospital after a suicide attempt. The hospital refused to return him to his parents when they said they wouldn’t be “affirming” this diagnosis, then placed him in the foster system. It’s believed that he ended up in the custody of the hospital’s “non-gendered” chaplain.

LifeSite News also reported on another horror from that region about a Virginia high school girl who started identifying as male in her freshman year. The school’s response was to “socially transition” her while keeping her parents in the dark. That social transition included instructing her to use the men’s rooms, where she was bullied and violently threatened to the point of a psychotic break that drove her to run away from home. She was immediately sex trafficked and raped, but police rescued her, only to send her to a juvenile detention facility … for boys. Her parents were not deemed “sufficiently affirming” to care for her. It was not until she had been repeatedly raped and trafficked across state lines to Texas that she was finally returned to them. 

Troubled children need protection and care. But the state forfeits its moral right to set the standard for such care when it insists on treating children as guinea pigs for medical malpractice. Parents should take note, particularly if their children attend a public school. Big Brother is watching, and your vulnerable child could be next.