(LifeSiteNews) — California seized a Christian woman’s teenage daughter for opposing her “gender transition,” and now the state is moving to put the girl up for adoption.
Alexandra Lyashchenko, an Orthodox Christian and legal Ukrainian immigrant, lost custody of her then-15-year-old daughter in 2024 after rejecting her “sudden desire to transition.”
Lyashchenko told NTD that California is “deciding that my daughter is going to be adopted out.”
Her family was “forced out of California” and is now “hiding in Florida” because California also wants her younger son, she added.
The far-left state has legally separated the girl and her parents, according to Lyashchenko.
She also said that she believes that her daughter was sexually assaulted in the foster system, noting that the girl was housed with boys due to her supposed “gender identity.”
Lyashchenko has accused Dr. Michelle Sager, the director of psychiatry at Children’s Legacy Center in Redding, California, of indoctrinating her daughter. She told NTD that she believes that her daughter’s school “secretly indoctrinated” her as well.
Lyashchenko said that her daughter also used the online platform Discord, which hosts radical pro-LGBT servers and where the girl looked into “online psychology.” The mother said that she suspects that Sager led her daughter to a “particular LGBT server” on Discord.
The girl eventually asked for consent to undergo testosterone, which her parents refused.
Testosterone and other transgender hormones are linked to serious and even life-threatening side effects, including cancer, stroke, and sterilization. “They called us culturally unfit for raising our daughter in present-day America, meaning we refuse to mutilate and sterilize her,” Lyashchenko said. She noted that she and her husband have “no custody conflict” and “fight unanimously” to protect the girl.
“We were forced out of our house,” which they put on the market but “were not even able to sell,” she said. Her family has also spent nearly $500,000 in legal fees.
Lyashchenko slammed what described as the “cult” that pushes child “gender transitions.” “Police, medical, educational, mental, and law enforcement – every entity works with [child protective services],” she added.
Asked if she had a message for the people separating her from her daughter, Lyashchenko said, “I want to see them in jail.”
“I want to testify and I would bring my daughter to testify and say what they’ve done to her,” she stated.
California is known for its radical pro-LGBT policies, particularly regarding children.
In 2022, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill, SB 107, that allows California courts to take “emergency jurisdiction” of children who come to the state for “gender transitions.”
Newsom later signed a law that banned schools from requiring parental notification about children’s gender confusion, though the Supreme Court ruled against the law in March.
The state also indoctrinates children into LGBT ideology in public schools, with mandatory pro-LGBT instruction and promotion of LGBT activist groups to schoolchildren.
Several other parents in California have lost their custody rights for not embracing their children’s “gender transitions,” including Abigail Martinez, whose gender-confused daughter ultimately killed herself after being taken by the state.
“She went to the railroad track. I was told that she just walked in front of the train, lay on her knees, raised her hands, and took her life away,” Martinez said.
In another horrific case, a teenage girl was abused in male juvenile detention center and trafficked across multiple states after her Virginia public school hid her gender confusion from her parents and a Baltimore public defender insisted that the parents were not “sufficiently affirming.”
Virginia Democrats later blocked a bill named after the girl that would have required schools to alert parents if their children expressed gender confusion and clarified that refusing a “transition” is not abuse or neglect.
Parents who opposed transgenderism have also lost custody of their children in Chicago, D.C., Ohio, and even Texas.
Child services agencies in the U.S. have taken children away after their parents refused vaccination or other medical interventions as well.
