Ted Hudacko’s son Drew was 16 when his mother took him to a sperm bank to have a sample of his sperm frozen. Then, when Drew was 17, she violated a court order, went behind Mr. Hudacko’s back, and took Drew to get a puberty-blocking implant called “Supprelin” surgically inserted into his arm at the Child and Adolescent Gender Center of UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital, Mr. Hudacko said.
“The part that really sticks out to me is that this mother had the son deposit sperm in a sperm bank prior to doing that because she knew that he was going to be sterilized,” Mr. Hudacko’s current attorney, Tracy L. Henderson, Esq., told The Epoch Times.
Mr. Hudacko only discovered the Supprelin implant surgery when he saw a $209,000 charge on his insurance in October 2021 after the surgery was performed in August that same year.
Mr. Hudacko told The Epoch Times, “[My ex-wife] just did not want me to have any contact with my son and did not want me interfering or even voicing my opinions on gender transition.”
The nightmare started for Mr. Hudacko in 2019. He was at home in his office when his then wife came and told him that their oldest son, Drew, 15 years old at the time, was transgender and that she herself was leaving after nearly 20 years of marriage. She filed for divorce four months later.
Due to COVID-19, it wasn’t until June 2020 that she and Mr. Hudacko went to family court in Contra Costa County with California Superior Court Judge Joni Hiramoto presiding. During the court hearing, all custody of Drew was taken from Mr. Hudacko. The only right he retained was to prevent Drew from undergoing “any gender identity related surgery” before the age of 18.
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Mr. Hudacko said, “It was a very bizarre hearing.”
He said the judge had a predetermined outcome that she wanted to implement. There was never any question about whether he would retain or share custody of his younger son, of whom he was granted 50/50 custody; and there was never any finding that he was abusive or neglectful, but he was nonetheless stripped of custody of Drew, he said.
He said The City Journal reported in detail the exchanges during that initial hearing, in which the judge asked him, “If your son [Drew] were medically psychotic and believed himself to be the Queen of England, would you love him?”
“Of course I would,” replied Mr. Hudacko, according to the court transcript. “I’d also try to get him help.”
The judge also seemed to be of the mind that if you are questioning or non-accepting of gender transitioning then you must have strong, fundamentalist, rigid religious beliefs, he said.
He found out later that Judge Hiramoto has a transgender child of her own who transitioned in his 20s, which she herself did not disclose.
Mr Hudacko said, “There was an undisclosed conflict of interest, bias of the judge, that she just failed to disclose, and she had very strong feelings about how these things should proceed with families.”
Judge Hiramoto had appointed Dan Harkins, who had special training in transgender situations, as the minor’s counsel.
Mr. Hudacko said, “He didn’t really have much to do with the younger son, but he was very much involved with the older one, frequently interacting with the doctors at UCSF on the behalf of my son, and according to medical progress notes was involved in multiple points in the planning and in concealment of the surgery that eventually happened.”
Judge Hiromoto designated UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital as the sole medical provider for Drew and did not allow Mr. Hudacko to include any other medical expert opinions that he sought out himself.
Mr. Hudacko currently has two cases open—one in family court about the divorce, the custody, and holding the parties accountable for violating the court order; and a second filed in federal court, in which he is suing everybody involved with going against the court order in which Drew was not permitted to undergo “any gender identity related surgery.”
The people he is suing in the federal case are his ex-wife and her attorney, Nathaniel Bigger; the minor’s counsel, Dan Harkins; UCSF; Asaf Orr, general counsel for UCSF at the time; Dr. Steven Rosenthal, medical director at UCSF; and Diane Ehrensaft, Ph.D., co-director of the Child and Adolescent Gender Center at UCSF.
Ms. Henderson, his attorney, brought attention to the contents of Exhibit G in the case.
“Exhibit G is extremely telling if you stop for a second. Why is the doctor writing a note about the progress of navigating around the dad that doesn’t want this? Right? The attorneys are working together to navigate around it. This is hugely telling,” she said. “Well, there’s a court order; you’re an attorney, you know, you can’t violate a court order. No attorney can say otherwise. … It was an order from Judge Hiramoto that said no gender identity related surgery till they’re 18 without parental consent or court order. So all of that to me shows absolute guilt on the part of the attorneys, who are officers of the court, absolute guilt, because they didn’t take those affirmative steps and because you couple that with the progress notes, there’s a concerted effort and everybody’s chattering behind Ted’s back, ‘How are we going to do this?’ And UCSF got $200,000 for this?”
Ms. Henderson added, “Our systems have been permeated by this gender dysphoria stuff, and the court system is permeated by it.”
Mr. Hudacko said that Ms. Ehrensaft is a clinical psychologist who believes that children as young as 18 months have a gender identity and can know it.
“So if we’re not listening to our 18-month-old child about what their gender preference is, we’re bad parents according to Diane Ehrensaft,” he said.
He said Dr. Rosenthal is part of a multi-year National Institute of Health (NIH) study on puberty blockers and has accepted a few million dollars on behalf of UCSF from NIH as part of that study. He’s also taken money from AbbVie Inc., the company that makes the drug Lupron; and Endo Pharmaceuticals, which makes the puberty implant that was put in his son.
Mr. Rosenthal’s UCSF clinic sees patients as young as three years old and will pursue gender-affirming medical treatments once a patient reaches puberty.
Mr. Hudacko said that Asaf Orr and Judge Hiramoto taught a continuing legal education class in October 2022. Mr. Hudacko obtained the video, in which Mr. Orr states that puberty blockers are harmless, have no side effects, and are fully reversible.
The course handout for that class used the example of a case in which minor’s counsel Dan Harkins wrote a report that debunked the scientific arguments of the parent in opposition, Mr. Hudacko said.
He said that the minor’s counsel report in the class was the one from his case and he is the parent in opposition.
“[Mr. Harkins] did not debunk the science; he got major facts completely upside down, completely backwards, completely wrong,” said Mr. Hudacko.
The Family Court System
Judge Hiramoto was initially assigned to Mr. Hudacko’s family court case after his ex-wife filed for divorce on Dec. 31, 2019. The first hearing before Judge Hiramoto was June 24, 2020. She also presided over hearings in August, November, and December 2020.Judge Wendy Coats took over the case in January 2021 when Judge Hiramoto was transferred to the traffic division. Mr. Hudacko discovered the $209,000 charge on his insurance in October 2021 after the surgery was performed in August that year. Mr. Hudacko requested a recusal, and Judge Reyes took over the case in January 2022. It has been with Judge Reyes ever since.
After discovering the surgery, Mr. Hudacko asked his ex-wife’s attorney to have the Supprelin implant removed, but there was a refusal, so he filed a motion to have the implant removed. He requested a hearing on a time-expedited (emergency) basis since sterilization by the puberty-blocking implant would be accomplished within six weeks by that point.
His ex-wife and the minor’s counsel, Mr. Harkins, who had been appointed by Judge Hiramoto on June 24, 2020, both opposed his motion and argued that there was no need for a time-expedited hearing. He was granted a hearing, but it was not set until five and a half months later.
Mr. Hudacko said that his son already would have been long sterilized by then. The hearing date also was three weeks before Drew’s 18th birthday.
In the family court, Mr. Hudacko is attempting to hold his ex-wife, her attorney, minor’s counsel Mr. Harkins, and UCSF accountable for violating a court order.
Judge Hiramoto technically has not been the judge for his case since the end of 2020; however, she has been seen among the observers on multiple Zoom hearings since leaving the case. There are multiple connections between Judge Hiramoto and Judge Reyes, Mr. Hudacko said.
Mr. Hudacko said he has put forth a motion for disqualification of Judge Reyes because his behavior is also biased as shown in the transcripts of the Feb. 2, 2024 and Feb. 13, 2024 hearings.
Ms. Henderson said that Judge Reyes showed bias by stating what his pronouns were in court. He also called her Mr. Henderson in court twice.
She said she told him, “Just for the record, Your Honor, I’m Mrs. Henderson.”
“And he engaged with me and said, ‘Oh, thank you for identifying yourself.’ I said, ‘I’m not identifying myself; that’s my name,” she said.
Mr. Hudacko is very concerned about getting a new and fair judge. He said he may get rid of Judge Reyes, but there’s no guarantee the next judge will be better. It will be a judge drawn from the same Contra Costa family court judge pool with the same ulterior motives and bias, he said.
The latest update in Mr. Hudacko’s case in family court is that Judge Reyes struck the motion to disqualify himself from the record.
Ms. Henderson said, “You can’t rule on that motion; it’s supposed to go to another judge.”
She said Judge Reyes denied it for lack of personal service, which is a technicality.
She added that Judge Reyes claimed he was not served the papers for the complaint, but she has the receipt showing that he was served.
“Which is really crazy if you think about it from a basic perspective,” she said. “The due process rights are, if you think a judge creates an appearance of bias, you have the right statutorily to file a motion to disqualify, and then you have the right to have another judge hear that and decide on it. Instead he just made it disappear from the record.”
Because of this, Mr. Hudacko and his attorney have filed a complaint with a higher appellate court to look at the situation of Judge Reyes not following the proper way of handling a motion to disqualify.
In addition, they filed a motion for reconsideration to hold UCSF in contempt because it is the hospital that did the surgical procedure of implanting the puberty blocker against the court order.
Originally, the judge said no, because UCSF was not a party in the family law case.
Ms. Henderson said, “That’s a bad ruling because even if you’re not a party to a case, but you know about an order, and you act together to violate it, you can be held in contempt.”
The appellate court has agreed to take a look at Mr. Hudacko’s case. Ms. Henderson said that is “a huge win for Ted” because it can be hard to get the attention of an appellate court in a situation like this.
“If you can’t see that this is a fight between good and evil and that this is evil, you’re not looking at what’s going on. Boys cannot become girls. Girls can’t become boys. And if you really dig into the transgender, transsexual, transhumanism world, those people are over-sexualized and this is some sick, perverted stuff happening,” she said. “I’m going to believe that God is on our side.”
The Epoch Times reached out to Ted Hudacko’s ex-wife for comment but did not hear back by press time.
A pseudonym is used in this article for Ted Hudacko’s son to protect the family’s safety and privacy.
