An Apple software engineer father who has not seen his transgender son for two years has told DailyMail.com he was denied custody by a...
An Apple software engineer father who has not seen his transgender son for two years has told DailyMail.com he was denied custody by a liberal judge who failed to disclose that she has a trans kid of her own while stripping him of his parental rights because he questioned if the teen was mature enough to make the decision.
Ted Hudacko, 56, is a father-of-two who lives in Richmond, California. He and his estranged wife Christine have two kids together; his oldest child is a 17-year-old who was born a boy but now wants to transition to become female.
Ted claims that in 2019, his estranged wife Christine sprang on him that their son, then 15, wanted to transition to female. She left him that same day, taking the teenager and the couple's younger son - now 15 - with her, and filed for divorce later that year.
Since then, Ted and his ex, a former BlackRock PR executive, have battled in court over custody of the child in front of Contra Costa Judge Joni Hiramoto.
In June 2020, Judge Hiramoto denied Ted custody of the teenager, granting him supervised-only visits, after he questioned if the child was mature enough to make the life-altering decision when he was a minor.
Judge Hiramoto also asked Ted if he thought it was a 'sin' for a person to transition - which he says he does not - and said he should accept and support the child even if they said they identified as the 'Queen of England'.
Judge Hiramoto did not disclose the fact that her own child transitioned from male to female the previous year.
Ted Hudacko, 54, says he was banned from seeing his child by Judge Joni Hiramoto, right, shown in one of her Facebook profile pictures, because he did not consent to his 15-year-old son transitioning to become female
Social media messages between the pair show her supporting the child through their transition, writing: 'I am so proud to your mom'.
Her daughter celebrated their one year anniversary of coming out in May 2020 - three months before Hiramoto stripped Ted of custody of his son.
Hiramoto never raised it as a potential conflict of interest.
She has now moved from family court to criminal court and has been replaced on Ted's case by a new judge but he is not hopeful anything will be done to help him.
Now 17, the teenager has begun therapy by having an implant fitted in their arm that will halt puberty as a male.
They will turn 18 on June 10, and will no longer need anyone's approval for the procedures.
Ted told DailyMail.com that he has been left out in the 'cold' from the beginning. He first spoke with Abigail Shrier, who is writing a book on the subject of children changing gender. Shrier told Ted's story in a City Journal article this week.
Ted says he is at a loss as to why his estranged wife is so eager to push on with the surgery and therapy without consulting him in the first place.
He says he misses him tremendously and is hurt that he cannot take part in touring colleges with the teenager.
'I have seen him but only from a distance, in the fall of 2021. Our younger son plays football at his school. I'd attend, and on a couple of occasions [the transgender child] went with his mother.
'I saw him sitting in the bleachers. It made me sad - among other things,' Ted said.
He says he consistently tries to contact the teen but that they always ignore his texts and emails.
One of Ted's recent texts to the child was in November 19. It read: 'I have researched your situation and had my opinion. All I want is for you to be happy. I just want to be your dad again. I beg you to open the door - please.
'That's all. I will support you. I want to see you, shake your hand, and see you smile again.
'I love you, Dad.'
He insists he never had any 'inkling' that his son wanted to change genders until his estranged wife sprang it on him, in front of the teen, in his office in August 2019.
'Maybe at the very end of the semester of his 9th grade, he had black fingernail polish and would wear this one wool sweater that was kind of long.
'From a distance, him standing to the side - it came down maybe half way down his thighs, you could think it was like a skirt but I figured he was going through a goth phase or something. That was it. I had no inkling,' he said.
'I was kept out in the cold, in the dark, for the longest time,' Ted told DailyMail.com on Tuesday.
The teenager had returned from the East Coast where he, his mother and brother had been consoling her sister.
She had been the victim of a horrendous attack by her husband at the time, who stabbed her multiple times in an attempt to kill her at the beauty salon where she worked. The husband - the transgender teenager's uncle - is now in prison for attempted murder and the teenager was in New York for the sentencing phase of the criminal trial.
Ted says he has been told by experts that the trauma of it all may have contributed to his son's apparently sudden desire to change genders but that he cannot know for certain because he has not spoken to the teenager or the estranged wife about it.
These comments show how the judge was supporting her own child through transitioning from male to female around the time that she became involved in the family's case. In August 2020 - a year after her own child came out - Hiramoto banned Ted from seeing his child without someone else there to supervise
'There are a lot of possible explanations - someone else said "Ted, if your son believes growing up to be a man then you violently assault your wife, why wouldn't you opt out of being a man,"" he said.
Christine left the home with the older teenager and the couple's other son. That other son still sees Ted - splitting his time between his house and his mother's - and the court has no concerns about how he parents him.
The first signs of trouble, he says, were when the teenager started seeing a therapist.
Ted's estranged wife Christine. She has not commented on the case
Ted agreed to it, but did not research who the therapist was - to his regret.
He had one session with the therapist and the teenager, then Ted never saw the therapist again. He was then informed of the medical progress the teen wanted to make - and was told a medical transition was in the works.
Ted insists that the court did not listen to his repeated objections.
In August 2020, he was stripped of his custodial rights and told he could not see the teenager - then 16 - unless it was supervised.
Despite having no relationship with him, he is responsible for paying all of the teen's medical bills.
When he finally received access to the teenager's medical records, he says he learned that lawyers for LGBTQ groups like Asaf Orr, of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, had more of a say than he did.
'What the hell is this guy doing sticking his nose into my kid's medical situation?' Ted fumed.
In June, the teen was 'greenlit' for receiving the implant with a doctor writing: 'Checklist complete'.
In August, it was fitted and in a disturbing November file which Ted has seen, a doctor wrote: 'Patient no longer suicidal.'
'How could he have been ready to undergo the implant if he was suicidal?' Ted said on Tuesday as he questioned the doctors who went ahead with it.
He was also told by Christine, he says, that the teenager given a sperm sample that has been frozen.
Ted is terrified that his child will change their mind on switching genders, as many others have done in the past, but that by then, the implant will have rendered them infertile.
Judge Joni Hiramoto has not commented on the conflict of interest. She is now a criminal judge
He says he has no issue with his child dressing in a different way, experimenting with hair or make-up or waiting until they are 25 to make decisions on permanently changing their body.
'There's a lot of unknowns... it's the permanent changes and lifelong medicalization.
'If he has been sterilized and his natural ability to produce testosterone has been destroyed, he either is going to have to take an artificial estrogen or likewise he'll need artificial testosterone.
'Maybe the power or prayer and miracles will happen and he will have an awakening and take this [implant] out. Maybe he will be all right. Based on the experts I have consulted, he has already been pretty damaged,' he said.
He added that he believes it would be safer for the age of consent for such surgeries to be raised until a person is 25.
'When he turns 18 he will have the legal right. There's nothing I can do. But from what I have read, the prefrontal cortex is not fully developed until 25.
'I know my own self, I look back to things I did in my earlier days and there's a lot of risky stuff. You think you are invincible or bulletproof.
'There are lots of families going through this. It is a special form of torment for them all.'
Ted is fundraising online via the Christian website Give Send Go to help cover his legal fees.
He says he feared GoFundMe would take any page he created down.
Christine's attorneys did not respond to requests for comment and the court declined to comment.
Ted says that in court, Christine has falsely and vaguely accused him of abuse and harassment - both of which he denies.
The pair are due back in court on Thursday to discuss a restraining order which she took out against him that prohibits him from contacting her.
He says it is absurd given they still share custody of their other son, who Ted says wants to go back to how things were before.
'I don't get to talk to him, I don't get to see him develop or grow. I was not an uninvolved, absent parent. I coached him in baseball.
'I do miss him. I see his younger brother every other week and for him, seeing this happen and the changes happening to his brother, there is some really disturbing stuff,' he said.
When contacted by DailyMail.com about Judge Hiramoto's conflict of interest, a spokesperson for the Superior Court of California, Contra Costa, said: 'Neither Judge Hiramoto nor the Court can comment on pending matters.'
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