For LGBTQ youth and families in Texas, attacks from the state’s political leaders are nothing new. This year, the state has been in the national spotlight again: The family members and doctors who allow for gender-affirming medical treatment are now being investigated for child abuse, under Republican Gov. Greg Abbott’s orders. The Imprint will track significant updates to this story as it develops.
Last updated June 13.
June 10: Hundreds of families in Texas are now protected from being investigated for child abuse for providing gender-affirming care, after an Austin judge issued a temporary restraining order against the state’s child welfare agency.
On June 8, a lawsuit was filed seeking such protection for three named families as well as all Texas members of an LGBTQ advocacy group called PFLAG. Two days later, Travis County District Court Judge Jan Soifer granted the request for protection. A hearing is likely to be scheduled in the coming days during which a judge will decide whether or not to extend the restraining order, the Texas Tribune reports.
June 8: A new lawsuit filed today seeks to protect hundreds of Texas families from being investigated for child abuse for providing their trans children with gender-affirming care. The lawsuit was filed by Lambda Legal and the ACLU on behalf of three named families as well as all Texas members of PLFAG, an advocacy group for LGBTQ people and their families. PFLAG has 17 chapters and more than 600 members in Texas.
An earlier lawsuit filed in March on behalf of one family led to an injunction against investigating any families for providing gender-affirming care, but the Texas Supreme Court overturned the injunction ruling that the courts only had authority to protect plaintiffs in the case.
According to the June 8 lawsuit, a 16-year-old trans child attempted suicide the day Abbott issued the directive instructing the child welfare department to investigate gender-affirming care as child abuse. He was treated in an outpatient psychiatric facility, and after he was discharged, child welfare authorities opened an investigation on his family, stating that the facility had reported his use of hormone therapy.
May 23: GENECIS, Texas’ largest provider of gender-affirming medical care for youth, will resume taking new patients, per a court order from a Dallas County judge. The clinic, based out of the Children’s Medical Center in Dallas, stopped accepting new patients and took down its website last November amid mounting political pressure and abuse allegations against its staff, but continued treatments for its existing patients.
The clinic’s founder, Dr. Ximena Lopez, filed a lawsuit in March demanding that the hospital allow doctors to continue providing the critical care. Under the new court order, the clinic can continue accepting new patients until April 2023, when the issue is set for trial.
May 2: Legal and medical experts from Yale and the University of Texas released a new report saying Attorney General Ken Paxton “warped” scientific evidence to fit his political agenda when he opined that gender-affirming care constituted child abuse.
Report authors said Paxton — and officials in Alabama which recently criminalized gender-affirming care for minors — exaggerated the risk of puberty blockers and hormone treatments, falsely claimed gender reassignment surgery was common for minors and ignored mainstream scientific evidence, instead relying on debunked and outdated studies.
April 7: Numerous child protection workers in Texas are leaving their jobs in response to the governor’s directive that they investigate parents of transgender children, according to reporting by the legal trade publication Courthouse News.
Randa Mulanax, a former investigator for the Department of Family and Protective who has testified in court against the directive and has resigned from the department, said she personally knows at least six fellow staffers in her Austin-area office who are also leaving over the directive. One former employee, Shelby McCowen, announced on TikTok that she was launching a hotline for parents of transgender children in the state to help them understand their rights and what to expect from a possible investigation.
April 4: Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick announced that he will push to pass legislation mimicking Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, which bans classroom instruction about sexual orientation and gender identity for kids below fourth grade, according to reporting by the Texas Tribune.
March 31: The U.S. Department of Justice sent a letter to all state attorneys general advising them that implementing policies to block transgender youth from accessing care or preventing parents from following the advice of medical professionals regarding care for their trans children violates several federal protection policies and constitutional rights enshrined by the 14th Amendment. The Equal Protection Clause of this amendment prohibits, in most cases, laws that discriminate on the basis of sex, and the due process clause protects the rights of parents to seek and follow medical advice regarding their children.
“A state or local government must meet the heavy burden of justifying interference with that right since it is well established within the medical community that gender-affirming care for transgender youth is not only appropriate but often necessary for their physical and mental health,” the letter states.
March 22: The Harris County Commissioners Court passed a resolution opposing Abbott’s directive to investigate parents for child abuse if they allow their trans children to receive gender affirming care. The resolution passed 3-2, along party lines, according to local media. Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee had previously pledged not to prosecute families targeted by these investigations.
March 21: The temporary injunction blocking Texas child welfare workers from investigating parents for providing gender-affirming care to children has been reinstated by the Texas Third Court of Appeals. Shortly after the injunction was originally granted on March 11, Attorney Ken Paxton appealed the decision, which suspended the order pending a ruling on the appeal. The appellate court said the plaintiffs’ lawyers had sufficiently proved that continuing the investigations would cause irreparable harm. The injunction will remain in effect until the case — set for trial in July — is decided.
March 11: A judge has temporarily blocked all child abuse investigations based on gender-affirming care for transgender youth, under a temporary injunction enacted by Travis County Judge Amy Clark Meachum Friday. Medical professionals are also protected from retribution for providing such care under the judge’s order.
Meachum said Abbott’s actions were “unconstitutional” and went “beyond his scope of authority.” She said the plaintiffs will likely be granted a full injunction in the later stages of the case. The next hearing is scheduled for July 11, and the temporary injunction will remain in effect until a final decision is reached by the courts, including if the case progresses to the appellate or state supreme court.
A supervisor with Texas’ child welfare agency testifying in Friday’s hearing said that investigators with her department had been ordered to prioritize and investigate all reports of parents allowing their transgender children to recieve gender affirming care. They were prohibited from deescalating such reports to a “priority none” status, which is the category given when abuse is deemed unlikely, or to close the case without initiating an investigation.
The same supervisor, Randa Mulanax, also said that she and fellow supervisors had been instructed by department leadership to not put any information about these cases in text messages or emails. Mulanax said this a deviation from the way cases are normally handled, and “very unethical.” Mulanax said she has tendered her resignation with the department over this issue.
Simultaneous to this hearing, the Department of Family and Protective Services held its first public meeting since Abbott’s directive to investigate parents of transgender children. Roughly 100 members of the public attended to speak out on the issue. The meeting was scheduled to be live streamed, but at the last minute the department announced it would not be publicly broadcast, claiming technical difficulties.
March 22: The Harris County Commissioners Court passed a resolution opposing Abbott’s directive to investigate parents for child abuse if they allow their trans children to receive gender affirming care. The resolution passed 3-2, along party lines, according to local media. Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee had previously pledged not to prosecute families targeted by these investigations.
March 21: The temporary injunction blocking Texas child welfare workers from investigating parents for providing gender-affirming care to children has been reinstated by the Texas Third Court of Appeals. Shortly after the injunction was originally granted on March 11, Attorney Ken Paxton appealed the decision, which suspended the order pending a ruling on the appeal. The appellate court said the plaintiffs’ lawyers had sufficiently proved that continuing the investigations would cause irreparable harm. The injunction will remain in effect until the case — set for trial in July — is decided.
March 4: Health care options for transgender youth in Texas dwindle in response to Gov. Greg Abbott’s directive that gender-affirming care for minors constitutes child abuse and that medical practioners who offer it can face criminal penalties.
Texas Children’s Hospital announced it was halting hormone therapy for trans youth in an effort to protect its doctors and nurses from “legal ramifications,” according to a statement released by hospital officials.
March 1-2: The American Civil Liberties Union files a lawsuit in an attempt to block the governor’s orders from taking hold. The plaintiffs in the case, referred to as Family Doe, include a 16-year-old transgender girl and her parents, one of whom is a Department of Family and Protective Services employee. They are one of at least a handful families being investigated by the department under the new directive, The Imprint has learned.
The following day, a district court judge issued a temporary restraining order to block the investigation of Family Doe. A hearing to consider blocking the governor’s order more broadly was originally scheduled for March 11, but has been put on hold pending the outcome of Texas’ appeal of the judgment in the Family Doe case.
The White House and federal government also weighed in on March 2, with a scathing rebuke of the directive from President Joe Biden, who called it “dangerous,” “cynical” and “the worst kind of government overreach.”
Biden’s remarks were accompanied by two recommendations issued by the Department of Health and Human Services. One, from the department’s Administration for Children and Families, offered states guidance on how to best serve LGBTQ youth in child welfare settings, clarifying the federal government’s stance that gender-affirming care was not only safe and medically supported, but “in the best interest of the child.”
The other document issued was a notice from the Office of Civil Rights indicating that Abbott’s directive was “likely a violation” of federal law, and encouraging families and medical professionals who felt they’d been impacted by it to file federal civil rights complaints.
Feb. 22: Gov. Abbott directs CPS investigations of parents providing gender-affirming medical care to their children is the most recent move in a years-long onslaught targeting LGBTQ youth within child welfare settings. Abbott’s Feb. 22 directive ordered child protection investigators to follow Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s interpretation of the law and investigate families for providing this type of care — which is legal in Texas and supported by every leading American medical organization — to their children.
Feb. 18: Paxton issues a nonbinding legal opinion in which he interpreted existing state law to conclude that gender reassignment surgery as well as hormone therapy or the prescription of puberty blockers can constitute child abuse.
Nov. 2021: Members of a state child welfare advisory group say that Department of Family and Protective Services Jaime Masters effectively killed a resource guide they had crafted to help child welfare workers better serve LGBTQ young people. Eighteen months after the guide was submitted to the department, Masters had refused to either approve it, respond with edits or explain why she wasn’t acting on it.
Another key resource for this population had already shuttered that month: The GENder Education and Care, Interdisciplinary Support – or GENECIS – program at Children’s Medical Center in Dallas, which provided mental health support and hormone therapy, was dissolved amid protests at which activists accused the hospital of child abuse, according to reporting by the Texas Tribune.
Aug. 2021: As the gubernatorial primary campaign kicked off, Abbott sent a letter to Masters, the head of the state’s Department of Family and Protective Services, asking if her agency considered gender reassignment surgery on minors to be child abuse. Masters responded that a report of this treatment — which she and Abbott both called “genital mutilation” — would constitute abuse under department policy and would trigger a CPS investigation.
Later that month, after a Republican primary opponent of Abbott’s posted a tweet suggesting that inclusion of LGBTQ-focused mental health resources on the state’s website was evidence of the government “promoting transgender sexual policies to Texas youth,” the department swiftly removed the resource page from public view. It remains disabled to this day.
Early 2021: The Texas Legislature has introduced 30 anti-LGBTQ bills in this session, including 13 that specifically singled out trans children. One such bill, which ultimately failed to pass, would have changed the state’s Family Codes to label gender-affirming health care as child abuse, which Abbott is now attempting to do through executive order.
2017: The state’s Foster Care Bill of Rights is amended to remove all mentions of protections for LGBTQ youth, who are overrepresented and often mistreated in foster care. That same year, the state’s religious freedom law was enacted, which permitted faith-based foster care providers to discriminate against LGBTQ foster parents.
