Ted Hudacko learned his adolescent son was being sterilized after receiving an insurance claim in the mail. None of the doctors involved had asked for his permission, nor had his ex-wife informed him that their eldest son was undergoing hormonal treatments or surgery despite a court order requiring both parents’ sign-off before their son underwent any “gender identity-related surgery.”
And yet the insurance claim revealed Hudacko’s son had already received a hormone implant, Supprelin LA, to suppress his male hormones and “transition” him into having female-like characteristics.
That was in 2019. In the years since, Hudacko hasn’t seen his son for more than 75 minutes, aside from a few minutes one Christmas Eve and from afar at school pickup or football with his other son. And in those years, he’s been locked in a legal battle against the Regents of the University of California, the doctors who oversaw his son’s “transition” at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), UCSF Child and Adolescent Gender Center’s legal director, his ex-wife, her attorney, and his son’s court-appointed attorney.
The announcement of his son’s transgender identity completely blindsided Hudacko, he told IW Features. His children had been living with his wife in upstate New York while she supported her sister through a crisis, and when they returned to California, his wife broke the news to him.
“Looking back at the months before, there are things I noticed and read as ordinary,” Hudacko said of his son’s behavior. “He grew his bangs out in the spring of 2019 and painted his nails. He was 14. Teenagers try things on. His high school had an LGBTQ allies club, and I think he joined it… None of it struck me as a crisis.”
He recalled the evening of August 17, 2019, when his wife entered their home office to tell him that their son had “something very important” to tell him. Hudacko recalled asking his then-wife whether they could wait until the next day to discuss what seemed like a serious and heavy topic.
“That went back and forth a few times until she said it herself: ‘[Our son] is transgender,’” he said.
Hudacko later learned that their son had announced his transgender identity to his mother 10 days prior.
Their son was in the office but didn’t speak the whole time, Hudacko said.
Then came the part that Hudacko said he regrets. He recalled raising his voice and telling his wife to “get out.”
“I meant ‘get out of my office,’” he explained. “I have never claimed I handled it well… I have thought many times since that it did not have to happen that way.”
The next morning, his wife and son were already gone.
“My son has not spent a night under my roof since,” Hudacko said.
The “gender identity” of Hudacko’s then-16-year-old son became a point of conflict in family court between Hudacko and his ex-wife, who was pro–gender ideology and pro-medicalization. But when Hudacko began reading the research literature on gender dysphoria and transgender-identifying individuals, he discovered that the evidence on the topic was far more uncertain than his son’s therapists and medical providers had made it seem.
The Supprelin LA implant his son received in 2019, for example, has not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for so-called “gender-affirming” treatments. It is, by definition, an experimental drug. Yet, this did not stop the co-directors of the clinic where Hudacko’s son received “gender-affirming” care, or the surgeon responsible for sterilizing Hudacko’s son. All of these providers were members of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), whose standards of care have been dismissed by multiple experts as pseudoscience at best. Files leaked from the organization in 2024 revealed WPATH members knew that “gender-affirming” care resulted in lifelong medical complications like sterilization, recognized that children could not comprehend and consent to sex-rejecting procedures, but still pushed vulnerable children into these life-altering procedures.
A new report from the Department of Health and Human Services helps reveal why. In “Wolves in White Coats: How Doctors and Hospitals Pushed and Profited from the Fraud of ‘Gender Medicine,’” federal officials revealed that “[pediatric gender clinics] promised a new stream of continuous revenue for pediatrics, endocrinology, and surgical specialties by taking physiologically healthy young people—who otherwise would not need to seek medical attention, and rendering them dependent for life on the medical system.” Each gender-confused child became a potential source of significant financial gain for hospitals and providers, with tens of thousands of dollars as potential revenue from each patient.
In Hudacko’s case, his insurance bills for his son’s gender-related procedures totaled more than $200,000.
Despite the deceptions underpinning gender ideology, Hudacko still faced initial defeat in the California court system. He later learned that the Superior Court judge assigned to his case, Joni Hiramoto, had a transgender-identifying son and openly affirmed her son’s cross-dressing, celebrated her son’s transgender identity, and addressed her son as her “daughter.” According to court filings, the judge did not disclose this as a potential conflict of interest that could affect her impartiality on Hudacko’s case.
Hudacko also later learned that Hiramoto and Asaf Orr (one of the defendants) led a 2022 Continuing Legal Education (CLE) seminar titled “Gender and Transgender Issues” with his son’s court-appointed attorney, Dan Harkins, in attendance. At this seminar, Hiramoto used Hudacko’s case as an example on how to defeat legal challenges from concerned parents fighting back against gender ideology.
“I think it’s better and a little bit more sophisticated to say, ‘This is the parent who should be given the decisions in this area because this is the parent who supports the approach that I think is in the child’s best interests,’” Hiramoto said during the seminar, according to court filings.
As his legal battle has played out, Hudacko has tried to keep the pieces of his life together. Until 2024, Hudacko said he bore the responsibility of financially supporting both his household and his ex-wife’s household amid the stress and grief of his family’s collapse. To manage the stress and find community with other parents who have lost children to gender ideology, he’s joined six different support groups. According to court filings, he suffered “severe anguish, fright, horror, nervousness, grief, anxiety, worry, shock, humiliation, and shame, knowing that his son… has been sterilized.”
With California’s court system ignoring his pleas for help, Hudacko has few places left to turn, so he is asking the Supreme Court to examine his case. The case could set precedent for other parents across the country who have had their children groomed into gender ideology by schools, hospitals, and online communities—often without parental knowledge or consent.
“I found out what had been done to my son because I read an insurance statement,” he said. “If I had not, I would still not know.”
He shared that his hope is for the Supreme Court to affirm the rights of parents across the country and rule that hospitals cannot hide child gender procedures from parents.
As this legal battle plays out, Hudacko’s son has become an adult and still identifies as transgender—and will forever face the mental and physical toll of being affirmed and mutilated.
“I am not asking a judge to give me my son’s childhood back,” Hudacko said. “I would settle for being a father he is willing to speak to.”
“It was and is my hope to see him and reestablish our former, loving father and son relationship,” he added.
Asked what he would tell his son if he could speak to him today, Hudacko said he hopes his son will one day know that he never stopped fighting for him.
“Every offer I made—the piano, the concerts, the Christmas gifts I carried to a church in case that was the only place I would see him—was me trying to find a door that was still open,” Hudacko said.
This article has been updated to reflect when Hudacko‘s child and spousal support ended.
