AUSTIN, TX — Texas has filed more anti-trans legislation this year than any other state. Republican and some Democratic legislators are destroying the childhoods of trans kids by denying them the gender-affirming health care they rely on to feel whole and genuine.
Now, parents will no longer be able to take their minor children who are gender diverse to a doctor who can assist the child in puberty-blockers or hormones, after the families have gone through extensive counseling and education prior to the treatments.
While the backers of the bill want you to believe they are protecting kids from medical procedures, Senate Bill 14 only bans procedures done for ‘the purpose of transitioning a child’s biological sex” — but not for elective cosmetic surgeries. Today tens of thousands of elective cosmetic procedures are performed on 13 – 18-year-olds, including, for example, breast augmentation and buttock lift!
The anti-trans ban will take effect on September 1, and four organizations, the ACLU, the ACLU of Texas, Lambda Legal and the Transgender Law Center have already stated they plan to sue Texas.
The passage of the bill took place over the determined protests involving large numbers of the LGBTQ community who spent days and nights at the capitol, some being arrested and forced out of the chambers for trying to get the legislators to take their concerns seriously. A small but significant victory was having the House send the bill back to committee just before the vote. It delayed the final vote only by a couple of days, but this is evidence that organized opposition to these reactionary laws can have an effect.
In the end, the lawmakers didn’t listen to parents or doctors or the kids themselves. The politicians used the issue to fear monger people who are uninformed about gender non-conforming issues and believe they are protecting the kids from abuse, rather than seeing that it’s the politicians who are the abusers.
Even before the bills were passed, the Republican political leaders threatened the parents with ‘child abuse’. Governor Greg Abbott directed the state’s child welfare agency to investigate families with trans children. This is the same agency that has been sued over the treatment of foster kids in their care, which the governor has done nothing to fix.
Even before the legislature began debating the bill, the Attorney General targeted the Dell Children’s Medical Center with investigations into ‘potentially illegal’ treatments on trans kids, based on the claims of a social worker at the Center who was filmed by right wing unethical Project Veritas. The Medical Center immediately stated that they prohibit hormone treatments for trans kids. Dell Children’s Medical Center is owned by Ascension, which is a Catholic health care system. It would appear there is a conflict between Dell’s stated position and the actual practice by the doctors, but there is still a lot of confusion about all of this.
A week after the investigation was announced, all of the doctors formerly working at the adolescent clinic (and apparently prescribing puberty-blockers and hormone treatments) are gone and are to be replaced. It isn’t yet known if they were fired or voluntarily left, but all the families with kids being treated there for any condition, including eating disorders, are now scrambling to find other doctors.
“These kids develop relationships with these doctors that they trust and that’s ripped away from them,” one mother said. It was already extremely difficult to get transition-related care in Texas. There were few providers and the waitlists were long. Several families told the Texas Tribune they waited months to be seen at Dell Children’s. Some families are going to either move out of state or try to see doctors out of state so their trans kids can continue to receive treatment. One mother has called several out-of-state clinics, eventually finding one that would put them on a nine to 12-month waitlist for care. Kids from families who can’t afford to travel will be vulnerable to depression and suicide.
To deny ongoing treatment to trans kids, some of whom have taken hormones for years, or to future trans kids is incredibly cruel. The kids are being used by the politicians to get the support of the same reactionary groups that were behind the attack on Roe Vs. Wade.
Karel Riley works with the People’s Tribune, and its bilingual sister publication, Tribuno del Pueblo, as a writer and contributor on human rights and women’s issues. “I’ve been a feminist since early adulthood. As a clerical worker, I joined a union drive with AFSCME seeking comparable wages to men for female-dominated jobs, and we were partially successful. In the mid-80’s our union participated in the historic Hormel strike in Minnesota. Later, I joined others in support of a local welfare rights organization,” she says.
