In February, Governor Greg Abbott directed the state Department of Family and Protective Services to launch child abuse investigations into parents who seek gender-affirming healthcare for their transgender children, based on an opinion released from Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office. Currently, a lower district court has ordered a stay on such investigations while the Texas Supreme Court decides whether Governor Abbott had the authority to require them.
Currently, 15 states have imposed restrictions on youth seeking gender-affirming health care. Last year, Arkansas became the first state to ban gender-affirming care for trans kids outright. Alabama followed suit earlier this month, making it a felony for doctors to administer puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgery for transgender youth. In Florida, the Department of Health released a memo recommending that minors should not receive gender-affirming care. Lawmakers have justified these measures by saying that children who receive these treatments are not old enough to consent to them and that they may cause irreparable harm.
At the same time that these bills ban gender-affirming care for trans kids, they carve out exceptions to allow doctors to continue to perform medically unnecessary treatments on intersex infants intended to make them fit into the categories of male and female—long before they are old enough to express any form of gender identity. “Intersex” is an umbrella term for people who exhibit variations in sex characteristics that do not fit the two most common paths of human sex development. “Transgender,” meanwhile, denotes a person whose sex characteristics fall into the binary but later chooses to identify as a different gender.
