A New York father lost custody of his eight-year-old son after attempting to block the minor from receiving puberty-blocking drugs.
32-year-old Dennis Hannon was engaged in a seven-year legal dispute with the Erie Supreme Court fighting to prevent his ex-wife from permitting his son to undergo a medical sex change through the use of puberty blockers.
Hannon says that his ex-wife, Amy Hannon, began “socially transitioning” his son in 2017 when the boy was just three years old, by dressing him as a girl.
“When I was picking him up, he was a boy named Matthew*,” the Daily Mail quoted Hannon stating. “And I didn’t realize that when he was in his mom’s care, he was actually a girl named Ruby.”
Amy Honor sent their son to a “gender-affirming” therapist in 2019, according to the report, who sought to put the youth on puberty blockers as the next step in his “transition.” The outlet said that Hannon “only discovered this information in 2020, when he took his ex-wife to court to find out what had been going on.” The year prior, Hannon received a letter from his son’s school “addressed to ‘the parent or guardian of Ruby Rose Hannon’ — which used she/her pronouns,” the Daily Mail wrote.
Hannon said that he thought the school had “mailed it to the wrong address,” and lamented being the “last to know [about his son’s social transition]. He was on the fast track to puberty blockers.”
The father additionally told the Daily Mail that his son, identified by the pseudonym “Matthew,” was “not distressed about living as a boy.”
Now, Hannon has been denied the legal authority to prevent his son from taking puberty blockers and female hormones, which would likely permanently affect his future fertility and development. Just one year after the court’s ruling, Matthew reportedly “reverted back to his original male gender” and is just a “regular little boy” according to the father.
Despite this, Hannon only narrowly retained visitation rights, which only permit him to see his son for for mere hours every week.
“It’s been a nightmare,” the father told the Daily Mail. “It’s completely destroyed my life.”
Hannon said that no official diagnosis of gender dysphoria has been made by medical professionals, and he strongly refuted the decision to medically transition his adolescent son.
This piece first appeared at TPUSA.
