Shasta County, California Is Not Safe For Families

A follow-up on our podcast with the mother of a 'trans child' taken by CPS

Art by Alexandra Lyashchenko

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 politics were reversed, there might be Antifa riots outside the courthouse. Community support has been nonexistent in red Shasta County, however. Even the conservative group Moms For Liberty has turned them away without explanation.

It takes a village to raze a child

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We talked to Alexandra in January for a podcast episode here at The Distance. After the Lyashchenkos moved to Shasta County from Massachusetts, their daughter’s new school participated in smears against them.

Alexandra has tried to raise awareness of her family’s plight online. She created a Substack as well as an X account, which she uses every day. The subjects of her reporting do not like her coverage.

Lawyers for Phoenix Charter Academy College View (PCA) recently sent the Lyashchenkos a ‘cease and desist’ letter accusing them of “false and highly inflammatory claims regarding PCA and Dr. Patricia Dougherty”, the executive director.

The letter threatens them under the California penal code against doxxing and absurdly denies that the school has taken part in a social transition.

PCA’s lawyers deride the “beliefs” of Maya’s parents that they have Constitutional rights to control the upbringing of their own child.

“While you may not like it and find it abhorrent to your beliefs that your child has elected to live their life identifying as male, the dignity that PCA and Dr. Dougherty have extended to your child in expressing their gender identity is a matter of following the law and affording them the protection of the anti-discrimination provisions of the law, not engaging in ‘facilitating social transitioning,’ or ‘castration’ as your posts wrongly claim, and you know it.”

The legality of this “dignity” is highly questionable, and PCA’s lawyers ought to know it. If they do not know it, then PCA may have a future claim to incompetent representation.

The US Department of Education determined in January that California has violated the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) by concealing ‘gender identity’ at school from parents. The US Supreme Court ruled in March that California educators cannot withhold a child’s ‘gender identity’ from parents.

As a medical-scientific matter, transition ‘medicine’ is associated with very high risk of sterilization (“castration”). This is not a right wing position. It has been the position of the National Institutes of Health since 2019.

PCA’s attorneys cite the Trevor Project in support of their case that the school is merely upholding Maya’s “dignity” by “protect[ing]” her “from discrimination” with “a safe and supportive learning environment”.

Responding to the letter from the Law Offices of Young, Minney & Corr, LLP, the Lyashchenko question their understanding of the law.

“‘Defamatory’ and ‘inflammatory’ are two very different things” that the attorneys for PCA have conflated, they reply.

The response requests “verbatim quotes of anything you consider to be defamatory” so that the Lyashchenkos can respond to specific charges rather than vague complaints.

Their response cites the Skrmetti decision by the Supreme Court to highlight the medical-scientific uncertainty that ‘gender medicine’ is safe or effective. “Sterilizing children is against the law in California”, the Lyashchenkos note.

They refer the PCA attorneys to the witness declarations of James Cantor, Michael Laidlaw, and Miriam Grossman in cases related to pediatric sex rejection ‘medicine’. They also recommend the WPATH Files by Mia Hughes.

It is worth noting that the Law Offices of Young, Minney & Corr, LLP, represenbting PCA, specialize in education law.

If the Lyashchenkos’s response letter is the first time anyone at the firm has ever read Cantor, Laidlaw, Grossman, or Hughes, their competence is in question.

If they have already read these sources and chosen to ignore them, then their honesty and integrity are in question.

Outsourced responsibility

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The Children’s Legacy Center, which has perhaps done the most to promote this travesty, is an example of the clannish rural power structures that rip outsider families apart in the name of ‘gender identity’ even in the most conservative locations.

“Our daughter no longer goes to Children’s Legacy Center but they are still operating, meaning more kids are in the system and taken by the system”, Alexandra tells The Distance in an update interview.

Shasta County ranks 31st out of 58 California counties in population, but has accumulated three times the average rate of “substantiated child abuse and neglect” compared to other California counties.

This is a huge red flag for abuse and validates concerns about potential human trafficking disguised as “dignity”.

While it is impossible to determine how many of these children are ‘identifying’ as transgender, the Lyashchenko case is suggestive. The magical, mystical, invisible, ineffable ‘gender identity’ of their daughter is the entire premise of every action that Shasta County CPS has taken against them.

In turn, the school and the nonprofit agency invoke the CPS action as a shield against their own accountability. This is a circular citation scheme. It is similar to WPATH and the Endocrine Society citing each other citing each other to claim that a consensus exists.

During a 27 January hearing, Judge Bigelow ordered the Lyashchenkos to appear in person henceforth rather than remotely.

This is a deliberate inconvenience to a family that fled the state for their own safety, justifiably fearing arrest on false charges of abusing their daughter. “It’s not safe”, Alexandra says.

Bigelow has issued a gag order. “She shut my husband up,” Alexandra explains. “Basically, she just adjourned the meeting” without explaining what the next hearing on 15 May will consider. “She just said that it wasn’t going to be a virtual presence, because we opened our mouths way too wide.”

“We are being financially drained” because they cannot sell the family home in Shasta County, Alexandra tells The Distance. “It’s a wonderful villa with everything you can dream of, but it’s empty. It’s missing us, and my son is missing it, and he’s crying, and he wants to go back.”

At the hearing, Judge Bigelow also granted custody of Maya to CPS, which has repeatedly failed at basic safeguarding. It was the second time Bigelow refused to return her to the Lyashchenkos.

Officials have systematically overruled, circumvented, and cut them out of health care decisions for Maya. She has been prescribed psychotropic drugs behind their backs, indicating that her mental health has deteriorated in state custody.

During this sojourn, CPS has failed to protect Maya from a Discord groomer. Her foster care arrangement has been a nightmare. Maya was placed in the same room and bunk bed as a boy, an objectively insane and dangerous choice which was justified by her ‘identifying’ as a boy.

Her parents only found out after the fact that she had been put on hormonal birth control — a decision which has never been explained to them, leaving them to imagine the worst.

As always, ‘kindness’ is the killer app and it has to be protected with endless lies. “Mama, I want people to be always nice to me,” Maya told Alexandra before she was taken away. “Even if they tell me lies.”

Maya has told the court she believes “I’m not safe with … my bio parents” because they “are against me as a person”. This language is not her own. Her parents taught her to tell the truth, but state-provided counselors have taught her to lie.

Alexandra maintains that the handwriting on documents submitted to the court in her daughter’s name last August appears fabricated. “We did not see … the original, because we left, so we were provided with [a] copy, and definitely there’s tracing”, she insists.

The documents accuse Alexandra and Andriy of physical violence. Both parents maintain the charge is false. Absurdly, “one of our attorneys did not even allow us to be present at that hearing” in August.

At the August hearing, Bigelow praised Maya for filing the documents, denied them without prejudice, and “instructed my daughter to re-file them”, Alexandra says.

“I was able to find a graphologist, a handwriting specialist” to look at the documents. The expert took their money and submitted a draft report. However, when Alexandra found more samples of Maya’s handwriting and contacted the graphologist, she refused to look at them or send a final report.

Instead, Alexandra says that the graphologist threatened to sue her for defamation when she mentioned possible corruption in Shasta County.

Attorneys for the Children’s Legacy Center/Arch Collective (“The Center”) threatened the Lyashchenkos with litigation in February, citing “recent online posts falsely accusing the Center and its staff of crimes such as engaging in child sex trafficking, money laundering, financial violations, ‘grooming,’ child abduction, and being part of a criminal ‘mafia.’”

“They were not happy about me posting, speaking about the cream of society”, Alexandra tells The Distance. She says that after she added the word ‘alleged’ to her posts, the Center stopped complaining.

The family has responded with an anti-SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation) motion, and now the Center is attempting to quash a motion for discovery.

New concerns on top of old ones

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While the legal battle continues, new evidence arrives all the time that transition is bad medicine.

A new study from Finland, which has single-payer health care and centralized record-keeping, found that 2,083 youth referred for gender services needed three to six times as much psychiatric care as their peers.

This is consistent with Maya’s evident deterioration that required psychotropic drugs. In California, such treatment can be administered by the school, without parental notice.

According to a new report from journalist Christina Buttons, California schools have become de facto mental health centers under the Children and Youth Behavioral Health Initiative (CYBHI).

Students can receive therapy and psychiatric diagnosis during school hours without any parental notification. “Minors can also get a separate Medi-Cal billing card not linked to a parent”, Buttons explains.

Puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones are not prescribed by California schools, at least not yet.

However, that has not stopped the Children’s Legacy Center from rolling out a red carpet of state services to support the ‘trans child’ Maya while her medical decisions and billing were taken out of her parents’ hands.

It is important to recognize what this is.

Adults around Maya identified her as a vulnerable child, established trust with her, normalized harm for Maya, and worked to secure the compliance of her parents. Having failed to get the Lyashchenkos to agree, everyone involved has worked to isolate Maya so she can have the “dignity” of medicalized self-harm.

The English language word for this behavior is ‘grooming’.

The people who do the grooming of the ‘trans child’ always object to being called ‘groomers’. While the word may be inflammatory, in the case of Maya Lyashchenko, it is not a defamatory allegation. It is the correct word for what PCA and the Center allegedly did.

None of the alleged adults who allegedly groomed Maya Lyashchenko will have to deal with the consequences of any medicalization. In future years, if she suffers from urinary incontinence, post-operative sepsis, early-onset dementia, or any other complications from transition, PCA, Dr. Dougherty and the Children’s Legacy Center will not be there to help her.

If her story goes sideways, as too many stories of children like her do, then state privacy laws will prevent the public from finding out what happened to her. California protects gender groomers instead of vulnerable children.

The Distance will continue to report on this story of institutional complicity. We are particularly interested in why such a small county takes so many children away from their parents.

Our podcast interview with Alexandra is embedded below.