While it’s unclear whether the order could be enforced, medical providers and child welfare advocates condemned the move as dangerous.
Gov. Greg Abbott told state health agencies in Texas on Tuesday that medical treatments provided to transgender adolescents, widely considered to be the standard of care in medicine, should be classified as “child abuse” under existing state law. His statements, made in a letter to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, followed an opinion on Friday by Attorney General Ken Paxton that said providing medical treatments like puberty-suppressing drugs and hormones to transgender teenagers should be investigated as child abuse. Governor Abbott specified that the reporting requirements applied to “all licensed professionals who have direct contact with children who may be subject to such abuse, including doctors, nurses, and teachers, and provides criminal penalties for failure to report such child abuse.” It is still unclear how and whether the orders, which do not change Texas law, would be enforced. While the state’s child welfare agency has said that it will investigate such claims, some county and district attorneys have stated that they will not enforce the opinion. “This is a complete misrepresentation of the definition of abuse in the family code,” Christian Menefee, the Harris County attorney, said in an interview. Mr. Menefee said that any such investigations in Harris County, the state’s most populous county, will not be prosecuted. “We don’t believe that allowing someone to take puberty suppressants constitutes abuse,” he said. Governor Abbott’s effort to criminalize medical care for transgender youth is a new front in a broadening political drive to deny treatments that help align the adolescents’ bodies with their gender identities and that have been endorsed by major medical groups. Twenty-one states introduced such bills last year, according to the Williams Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law. Arkansas passed a law making it illegal for clinicians to offer puberty blockers and hormones to adolescents and banning insurers from covering care. But the law was temporarily blocked by a federal judge in July after the American Civil Liberties Union sued on behalf of four families and two doctors. Several such bills were also introduced in Texas. None passed. Facing political pressure, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and Children’s Medical Center Dallas closed the state’s only multidisciplinary clinic for transgender youth in November. The letter from the Texas governor comes as early voting has begun in primary elections across the state. Election Day is March 1. Mr. Abbott and Mr. Paxton, both Republicans, face challengers who have questioned whether they have been sufficiently conservative.
