“Investigate them without exception” is what administrators of Texas’s Department of Family and Protective Services were told about reports describing the providing of gender-affirming care for transgender youth as “child abuse” — even if they thought the complaints were without merit.
Texas District Court Judge Amy Clark Meachum Friday evening declared unconstitutional Governor Greg Abbott’s executive order manding state agencies investigate anyone involved in or facilitating medically-necessary gender-affirming care, including parents, for “child abuse,” and criminally charge those people if possible.
Judge Meachum issued a temporary injunction, declaring the order, The New York Times reports, “had been improperly adopted and violated the State Constitution.” She scheduled a trial date for July.
But in a stunning development, the Times adds that child abuse investigators “have been told to prioritize cases involving the parents of transgender children and to investigate them without exception, after the state’s governor ordered certain medical care to be treated as abuse, an investigations supervisor said during the hearing.”
That news comes after a report earlier this month in Forbes that found Governor Abbott’s “campaign defended the governor’s directive calling for child abuse investigations into parents of transgender children who have received gender-affirming care … with campaign officials calling the issue a ‘winner’ for the governor’s campaign … in spite of widespread controversy and opposition from medical experts.”
The supervisor, Randa Mulanax of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, The Times adds, “testified in an Austin courtroom that the agency was not given the freedom to determine that a given report involving a transgender child was quite likely not in fact a case of child abuse — known as ‘priority none’ status — and that investigators were not able to close the cases.”
“I’ve been told about that directly,” said Ms. Mulanax, who has submitted her resignation to the department. “You cannot priority-none these cases.”
Mulanax “said she and others were told not to put information about the cases in email or text messages — instructions that she said were highly unusual in her years of experience at the agency.” She called the order “unethical.”
And just hours ago, a reporter for The 19th, an independent nonprofit newsroom, revealed that medical staff at a top Texas hospital for transgender youth “expected suicides” based on political pressure from Abbott’s office and lawmakers.
Nearly 5 hours of recorded internal hospital meetings obtained by @19thnews show political pressure from Gov’s office + TX lawmakers before GENECIS shut — and that hospital staff expected suicides https://t.co/V5a3SlWcgw
— Orion Rummler (@i_oriion) March 11, 2022
Written by David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement. Photo via NCRM.
