Shasta County, California Is Not Safe For Families
A follow-up on our podcast with the mother of a 'trans child' taken by CPS
The Lysaschenko family has been through three lawyers in what they call “the kangaroo dependency court of Shasta”, where Alexandra and Andriy Lyashchenko are framed as bigots because they refused testosterone for their daughter, ‘Maya’.
Under pressure from the judge, Molly Bigelow, who rubber-stamps Child Protective Services (CPS) actions, each attorney has folded, becoming a tool of the court against the parents. We have seen this happen before in similar family court cases.
The husband and wife are immigrants, but they are white immigrants, the wrong kind for liberals to care about. Shasta County officials have displayed outright xenophobia by accusing them of derisively calling their daughter ‘it’.
In fact they used a very common gender-neutral term from their native language. “I stopped using past tenses because the verbs are very gendered,” Alexandra tells The Distance. “Eventually I even replaced verbs with nouns” in an effort to appease Maya.
If the p…
