After a years-long court battle, a California man was finally granted custody of his young son whose mentally ill mother considered him “nonbinary” and forced him to wear girls’ clothes.
Last month, Harrison Tinsley reached a settlement in which he received full custody of his four-year-old son, Sawyer.
Nonbinary Decision
Sawyer’s mom is Tinsley’s ex-girlfriend. At the time she discovered she was pregnant, both she and Tinsley were “ecstatic,” he wrote on the GiveSendGo page he used to raise money for legal expenses.
“Unfortunately,” he continued, “that excitement turned to pain when his mother, who suffers from serious underlying mental health problems, abruptly ended our relationship and prevented me from seeing Sawyer.”
The estranged couple spent a year duking it out in court. Tinsley finally got to meet his son when Sawyer was 15 months old. Soon afterward, Tinsley returned to the Bay Area and “was granted 50/50 custody,” he penned.
That was just the beginning of Sawyer’s troubles. His mother decided she was a “nonbinary” lesbian and began rearing her son as “nonbinary” as well. According to the New York Post, “This included a cruel campaign of gaslighting like referring to Sawyer with they/them pronouns over his protestations, and forcing him to wear girls’ diapers, dresses and makeup, the dad claimed.”
“She threw Sawyer a girly themed party for his second birthday party where she made him wear a dress donned with a sheriff’s badge,” Tinsley alleged on his GiveSendGo page.
In addition, he claimed, she “took the child to Disneyland but refused to let him go on any rides unless he wore the princess shoes she had bought for him,” reported the Post.
“Sawyer says his mother tells him he is both a boy and a girl, but Sawyer is fully aware he is a boy,” Tinsley wrote. “However, I am certain this is confusing him and emotionally traumatizing. He is not old enough to even be thinking about this ideology, but his mother is coercing him into it.”
Tinsley elaborated on this on the July 30 “Daily Signal Podcast.”
“I know he’s a boy,” Tinsley said. “He wants to be a boy. He adamantly expresses that. If you say anything to the contrary, he gets very upset, and it’s just insane that people, any person, would push this ideology onto a child, as opposed to just [allowing them to] be happy with who they are.”
Arrested Development
According to the Daily Wire:
Back in 2021, Sawyer’s mother was arrested and booked in jail for felony child endangerment when then-1-year-old Sawyer fell off a bed during an altercation between the mother and her roommate, police body cam footage viewed by The Daily Wire shows.
The San Francisco police gave custody of Sawyer to the mother’s two dads for the night and put her on a psychiatric hold at the hospital. [Emphasis added.] She was ultimately not convicted of a crime.
During the psychiatric hold at the hospital, Sawyer’s mother told a psychiatrist that she has borderline personality disorder, a condition that can involve impulsive and risky behavior, the psychiatrist later testified in San Francisco family court.
Child Protective Services investigated the police incident and concluded that Sawyer’s mother was not a safety threat to her son. Her mental health was a “complicating factor, but not a safety issue,” reads the CPS report, provided by Tinsley.
Sawyer’s mother was on five different medications for PTSD, mood stabilization, ADHD, and anxiety at the time of the CPS investigation, the CPS report said.
Tinsley only learned of the incident last year, at which point he filed for full custody of Sawyer. Despite having presented a mountain of evidence that “Sawyer’s health, safety and wellbeing were being jeopardized by his mother, her mental health problems and political ideology,” his request was denied, he wrote on GiveSendGo. On top of that, the court allowed a pediatrician affiliated with a radical gender clinic to continue to see Sawyer and scheduled a hearing to decide whether Sawyer’s mother could force him to get one of the Covid-19 vaccines over Tinsley’s objections.
Appealing Outcome
According to the Post:
Tinsley appealed the decision last December, and claims that Child Protective Services in San Francisco became involved following an alleged “incident,” about which he declined to further elaborate.
CPS investigated and recommended Tinsley be granted full custody of the boy, and that the mother be subject to regular drug and alcohol testing, he claimed.
Tinsley acknowledged that the investigators more than likely had different politics than he, but said he was “grateful” to them for “[putting] politics aside and [doing] what they felt was best” for the child.
“Kids don’t care about sex or identity or all of these fake weird concepts. They just care about having fun and spending time with their parents,” he told the podcast.
In an interview with LifeSiteNews last week, Tinsley credited several factors with giving him the strength to pursue his expensive, unpleasant custody battle: “my faith, Christianity,” “family, friends,” and a “deep feeling in my soul that I have to do this no matter what pain I go through.”
Tinsley believes his victory should serve as an encouragement to all who oppose radical gender ideology.
“We just need to all find it within ourselves now to … speak the truth and we can actually stop this stuff, we can actually make a difference,” he said. “The time is right now, we have the momentum, we have the high ground.”
