AUSTIN, Texas — A Texas district court judge on Friday temporarily halted all child abuse investigations into gender-affirming care for trans minors, after a daylong hearing that pitted the mother of a transgender teenager against the state’s lawyers.
District Court Judge Amy Clark Meachum read the temporary injunction from the bench late in the afternoon. She said the injunction blocks the state from investigating anyone solely for assisting or providing gender-affirming care to transgender minors until the end of a trial in the case.
The state can appeal the injunction. A trial is set to begin in July.
The mother of the transgender teenager who is under investigation by the state took the stand during Friday’s daylong hearing on Texas’ decision to target gender-affirming care of trans minors as child abuse.
Identified in court by a pseudonym, Jane Doe is a state employee who says she was put on leave because her 16-year-old transgender daughter is undergoing medical treatment. Doe testified that she wished she never had to go before a judge to discuss the personal matters of her child’s health care.
Her attorney said the state’s investigations into families who allow their trans kids to seek out gender-affirming are “traumatizing families.” He urged the court to stop the probe into Doe — and any other family under investigation for allowing their trans children to seek medical care.
“This vast overreach by the defendants established a new presumption of abuse by parents of transgender children,” said Paul Castillo, senior counsel with Lambda Legal, which along with the ACLU of Texas, is representing the plaintiffs.
Doe’s lawsuit is the first legal test for the state’s decision to investigate certain medical treatments for transgender minors, including puberty blockers and hormone therapy, as abuse.
Since Gov. Greg Abbott directed the state’s child protection agency to target such treatments last month, nine investigations have been opened. The state’s largest children’s hospital has paused some gender-affirming therapies. Several families with transgender children have indicated they will move, and doctors, teachers and CPS workers have expressed concern and confusion over how to implement the order.
On Friday, doctors with expertise in medical ethics and trans care testified that the types of treatments targeted are safe and, at times, necessary, and a child protective services supervisor who resigned over the order said reports on transgender children are now being prioritized by the state and state workers are being told not to communicate about the cases in email or text.
The state’s lawyer on Friday argued Doe and Megan Mooney, a Houston psychologist also suing to block the order, have not suffered consequences enough to challenge it.
“All Jane Doe has been subject to is one meeting with an investigator” from the Department of Family and Protective Services, Assistant Attorney General Courtney Corbello said. Plaintiffs are “merely fearful” of harm “at this point.”
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