GOP War on Trans Teens: The Unacceptable Cost in Texas and Alabama

L. still remembers what her son wore on a winter evening nineteen years ago. She can still see every detail: the blue Angry Birds T-shirt, the black Bakugan hoodie unzipped down the front, the jeans that had once been bedazzled and that still faintly bore the heart-shaped pattern where the plastic jewels had been, the Dr. Who socks — one still on his foot, the other on his bedspread. The belt. The belt is the one she most remembers. It was white and bore images of M&M characters, green and red candies cavorting across its length. A child’s belt, almost a toy, really. The belt was what her son used to hang from the ceiling fan in their bedroom. He was nine years old.

That evening kicked off a years-long journey on L.’s part to stabilize her son’s mental health. He started counseling immediately. She was concerned that her husband’s divorce might have contributed to her suicide attempt. Or bullying. There is also the possibility that he was homosexual. “When I asked him why, all he could tell me was that he was broken and there was no way to fix this,” L. says. “He didn’t know how to express what was different.”

It wasn’t until four years later that L.’s son, who was assigned female at birth, came across a YouTube video of a kid his age talking about being trans and, as L. explains it, “he said it was like, ‘Oh, my God, there’s a word for me.’ ”He shared the news with his mother and soon began to bombard her with PowerPoint presentations and medical studies on why he should be taking puberty blocking drugs. “I’m a very science-minded person, so I was like, ‘Show me the studies,’ ”She said. “I had to be educated so that I felt safe doing it.” Some months later, after many tests and consultations with medical and mental health professionals, they went to Whattaburger to celebrate her son’s first puberty blocker shot. What L. didn’t know yet is that they were also celebrating the beginning of the end of his self-harm. “It’s the only reason he’s still alive,”She tells me this pointedly.

However, her reason for telling me this tale is not to prove that point. It’s to talk about the fact that she’s already made it. It was a success. L., who, like many parents, asked to use her first initial, has been going to Texas Legislature meetings since 2019, to share their personal experience with what the scientific committee has long believed to be true: gender-affirming healthcare is necessary and can save lives. They’ve watched with alarm as bills that would ban that care have gotten closer and closer to becoming law, despite the pleas of many families like theirs and the overwhelming advice of the medical community, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, and the American Psychological Association. There are no mental or medical organizations of any repute that doesn’t support gender-affirming care.

Yet, the United States has seen conservatives attempt to ban it over the past several years. Last month, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is currently awaiting trial in a Securities Fraud Indictment as well as being investigated by the FBI for allegations regarding bribery, abuse of office, and other charges, released an opinion that argued that gender affirming care could be considered child abuse according to Texas law. Four days later, on Feb. 22, Gov. Greg Abbott gave the directive to the Commissioner of the Department of Family and Protective Services, (DFPS), on Feb. 22. “conduct a prompt and thorough investigation of any reported instances of these abusive procedures”We called for teachers, nurses, doctors and nurses who didn’t report. “such child abuse”You could be subject to criminal sanctions The court blocked the directive on March 11. However, the investigation into families was continuing as of last week. Paxton tweeted: “This fight will continue to the Supreme Court. I’m ready for it.” (Paxton’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)

L. read the letter that Abbott wrote the day it was published. “I had a panic attack,”She says it to me. “I felt shaky, queasy, heart was racing, dry mouth.”Child Protective Services was also called to her house on March 1, in order to verify that there had been an incident. “multiple allegations dealing with the genital mutilation and hormone abuse you inflicted on your child.”She was smarter than to allow the woman into her home and directed her to her lawyer. “It’s pretty much been a terrible day ever since.”

The first ban on transmedical careIt was implemented in 2020 and provided a solution to a problem that had never existed. The medical guidelines for treating trans children prescribe a set of best practices known to improve mental well-being. Parents are encouraged to love and help their children before puberty. “socially transition,”This could mean that they have to change their pronouns or their clothes. Safe and reversible hormonal blockers can be used to help a child get through puberty. A teenager can decide later that they would like to use hormones to help them transition. This must be approved by their parents, their psychiatrist and their medical team. Patients under 18 years of age are rarely eligible for surgery. Only in cases where there is an immediate need. There are exceptions: Trans children are more at risk than any other age group for suicide. Transgender-affirming care has been shown by studies to reduce the risk to such an extent that it is comparable to their cisgender peers.

The introduction of the first medical banning did, however, solve a problem. There was a need to continue mobilizing the right-wing base and the feeling that LBGTQ questions would be a good method to do this. 2015 was the year when Obergefell v. HodgesDespite the case being before the Supreme Court’s Supreme Court, legislation against marriage equality was rejected by voters. Signing a bill that allowed businesses to refuse service to LGBTQ people on religious grounds caused such an uproar that it threatened to end Mike Pence’s political career in Indiana (though it probably also put him on Trump’s radar). The blowback over North Carolina’s 2016 bathroom bill was swift and definitive. It seemed that Americans as a whole just didn’t hate LGBTQ people as much as conservative operatives wished they did.

In 2019, right-wing think tank American Principles Project created a winning variant on the theme by inventing the wedge issue of trans children playing school sports. It was obvious that cis children could easily be made to be at disadvantage, and the idea quickly took root. “2020 set a record number of anti-trans bills filed in the U.S.,” says Kate Oakley, the Human Rights Campaign’s state legislative director and senior counsel. “That number more than doubled in 2021, and we are on track to surpass it in 2022.”

Anti-trans medical banning was a new development brought to legislators by far-right Heritage Foundation/Alliance Defending Freedom. This group, which has been labeled an anti-LGBTQ hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, was also behind the anti-trans medical banning. This year, at most 38 of these laws have been introduced in the legislatures. Alabama’s includes a provision that would mandate that teachers out their students and has such vague language that it could be interpreted to mean that even the children themselves would face up to 10 years in prison for receiving gender-affirming care. Idaho’s bill would send medical providers to prison for life. Arkansas’, which passed in 2021 despite being vetoed by the governor, would revoke the medical license of anyone practicing gender-affirming care and prohibit doctors from even referring patients for it. An ACLU lawsuit blocked the law’s implementation a week before it was due to take effect.

“I mean, these bills are patently unconstitutional in just about every possible way you could think of,”Kaitlin Wellborn, an attorney representing the ACLU in Alabama, said this. “It’s almost as if they tried to be as unconstitutional as possible.” Sydney Duncan, an attorney for Birmingham’s Magic City Legal Center, agrees: “The Supreme Court that we have right now is basically the same court that broadened the scope of sexual discrimination to include sexual orientation and gender identity. So it would be very strange for the same court to go back and say, ‘Well, we didn’t mean what we meant two years ago on this definition.’ ”

These bills are extremely pernicious because it is unlikely that they will ever be passed. They are exposed for what they truly are: A political ploy that uses children’s lives as pawns. “This is an insane amount of government overreach,”One Texas mother of a transchild told me. “This is literally a state government telling community members to report children to the state and asking the state to come into their homes and round them up. It’s fascism, and it’s starting with trans kids now because they are vulnerable and there are so few of them, but who knows what the next form of this will be? Whatever the next polling data of extremist politics tells them to do, that’s what they’ll go for next. We need community members to hold the line with us.”

It is clear that the other side is holding onto theirs. It’s no surprise that Abbott and Paxton both issued their directives before their primaries. It is clear, too, that redistricting has made the state so gerrymandered, that the primaries are all that matters. Whoever wins those will win the general election by default. This means that tempering views is becoming less common in general elections. “Primaries tend to be the focus of extremists in both parties,”Neil Giles is a Houston lawyer and father to two non-binary sons. “So you end up with wilder and frankly stupider people in government office. You end up with people like Ken Paxton. They’re throwing red meat. That’s all these politicians are doing.”

L. also noted that it is very easy to make a fool of yourself. Paxton’s opinion was so flawed that it drew rebukes from numerous sources he cited, some of whom said that he was distorting their research to arrive at a conclusion entirely at odds with what their data actually shows. Notably, the opinion drew parallels between gender-affirming care and our country’s history of forcibly sterilizing minority populations; implied that parents that consent to this care could be suffering from Munchausen syndrome by proxy; and referred repeatedly to “genital mutilation”As if affirming care was in that category, we remind readers that “female genital mutilation”Had been made “state jail felony”You can leave a cut-out for male circumcisions.

In numerous visits to the Alabama state capital to sit in on committee hearings for these bills, Vanessa Tate Finney, the mother of a trans 13-year-old, has witnessed firsthand the lack of rigor that’s gone into their introduction in the state legislature. “I don’t think they have a personal vested interest in the bill because even the bill’s sponsors don’t know what’s in the bill,”She pointed out that far-right think groups often supply the language for a bill to legislators who are willing to sponsor it. Many have misleading names such as the “Alabama Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act,”The bill is currently making its way through the legislature. Tate Finney supports the bill and says its sponsors are unable to distinguish between legitimate medical professionals and associations such as the American College of Pediatrics. This hate group, which Tate Finney claims is anti-LGBTQ, was specifically named so that it could be mistakenly confused for the apolitical American Academy of Pediatrics. “I have yet to hear anything in testimony from the side that is supporting the bill and is actually factually true,”She says it to me. “They see ‘MD’ behind someone’s name and don’t understand that there is a tremendous difference between a doctor who is a plastic surgeon and a doctor who is a primary-care physician to children who identify as transgender, who live with gender dysphoria, a child like my own who at 13 is at the prime age to be really, truly affected by the long-term legal outcomes of this. They have no experience with these children. In fact, their star witness is a plastic surgeon.”

Last year, she says, one of the sponsors of an affirming-care medical ban bill was asked if he’d ever met a transgender or non-binary minor, and not only did he admit that to the best of his knowledge he had not, but, she says, the committee had to ask for clarification of what “non-binary” meant. “It’s very, very heartbreaking,”Tate Finney “to have to tell your child, ‘The hope that you had of becoming the person that you know that you are has been taken away by a bunch of people who don’t know what they’re doing.’ ”

Meanwhile, kids who can’t yet vote are watching from the sidelines as their futures are decided by such people. “A lot of our young people are really spiraling,“ says Amanda Keller, the director of the Magic City Acceptance Center, a safe space for LGBTQ kids in the Birmingham area. “They’ll go through the process of being angry and grieving and panicking and trying to figure out what to do and what comes next. The word ‘hopeless’ comes up a lot.”The hopelessness remains, regardless of whether or not these bills make it into law. “We know that there were multiple children who attempted or did die by suicide because the bill passed in Arkansas, even though the ACLU got an injunction very quickly,” says ACLU’s Welborn. “Just the fact of passing it will make some children feel like they have no way out.”

Texas is giving the country a chance.To see what it looks like for trans kids and their families, click here And it doesn’t look good. One day after Abbott’s directive was issued, an employee of the Department of Family and Protective Services had been fired. “placed on leave from her employment because she has a transgender daughter with a medical need for treatment of gender dysphoria,”According to a lawsuit that was filed on behalf the family by Lambda Legal, the ACLU and Baker Botts LLP in Houston, Since then, multiple families have been contacted by DFPS, and numerous providers, including Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, have “paused” certain gender-affirming services. This leaves some families scrambling to figure out how to continue their child’s care, and doctors and medical professionals torn between their fear of legal action and the Hippocratic oath they took to follow what they know are best practices. “It’s creating massive confusion,”One parent said it to me. “And I think that’s the point. Doctors are like, ‘Could I lose my license? Could I be targeted for not reporting’? I’m hearing panic in the therapist community, like, ‘Can I still talk to my patients? Can I talk to their families?’ ”

It means that support systems designed to protect vulnerable children have been dismantled overnight. “It’s one thing for a random man at the grocery store to say a hurtful comment in passing about what you look like, because I don’t have to deal with that after I leave this grocery store, right?”Indigo Giles is a 19-year-old Texan who is not a woman. “But you can’t run away from the governor of the state. It’s so frightening for the person in charge to be saying that.” And even kids who were not yet receiving affirming medical care feel the effects. In cases of actual abuse, the license DFPS has to seek out a child — to go to their school, to talk to them without their parents’ permission — is a necessary safeguard. It has also meant that parents who worked so hard to support their children and accept them have had to prepare their children for the possibility that their bubble could burst. “Parents are having to have that very first conversation with their child,”According to the Rev. Remington Olivia Johnson, an Austin-based activist and health care professional who recently led a rally against Abbott’s directive outside the governor’s mansion. “No one has put transphobia into the minds of these children. No one has hung that on them. And now we have Abbott ripping apart this protective shield over these children and saying, ‘I know who you are is wrong, and I will destroy any sort of childhood innocent innocence that you had around this.’ ”

That has certainly been what it’s felt like for K., whose 10-year-old daughter is trans and who spent a recent Saturday having her two young children meet with a lawyer to discuss what to do if DFPS shows up at their school, and to read through a letter each child now carries with them at all times — one copy in their backpack, one in their pocket. “It says, ‘I do not consent to speak with you. Talk to my lawyer. Here is his information,’ ”K. said this during a very emotional conversation last week. “I mean, my kids are in elementary school, and this is what we’re doing on a Saturday.”

K. and her husband grew up together in Texas. They are close to their parents and a lot of their extended family. They live in Austin’s affirming community, where the kids love school and their friends. It is also the house they have always planned to raise their children in. K., who had been telling herself almost inexplicably that she would stay put in Texas for the sake of her children, was actually lying up to this point. “And that’s what’s happening now,”She said. “I was resolved to stay and fight, especially for those who can’t leave. But now lawyers are telling us to leave, to get out while we can.”

K. had already made plans to fly to Portland to view real estate, four days after Abbott released his letter. Her Fox-watching Republican father sobbed when she told her parents. He was relieved that she was doing the right thing to protect her family. Friends have told her that Portland will provide a soft landing, but she’s still nervous. “I am so conditioned to trauma now, even hearing that, I don’t believe them. I don’t feel safe,”She said. “I don’t know that I ever will.” She also doesn’t know how she will explain herself to friends she has made in the trans community who don’t have the privilege and the resources to get out (in fact, there are now numerous GoFundMe pages devoted to helping the families of trans kids leave Texas).

“I’m like, ‘I’m such an asshole,’ ”She burst into tears once more. “But, I mean, I’m crying every two seconds. I’m not eating and sleeping. I’m at a point where I can no longer take care of my family’s daily life here, and so I need to take some steps back and then fight from a safe distance.” She’d like to think that she can postpone the move long enough to let her kids finish out the year at school, but she’s not sure. Her daughter came to her wondering a few days ago. “Am I going to die?”K. asked her why she thought so. “Because everybody hates me,” was her daughter’s reply.

Last Thursday, almost one week after the judge blocked Abbott’s directive, S. walked into the family room of his central Texas house to find two CPS agents standing there. They had been allowed in by an older kid, but they were there for reports about the eight-year-old. “I about freaked,”He told me. “I’m like, ‘Whoa, what are you doing in my house?’ ”

As S. learned, someone at his workplace had reported that his child, who was assigned male at birth, had been seen using the women’s bathroom. “They said abuse charges were being alleged against me, gender abuse charges. The person that made the report was saying that because I’m trans, I’m forcing my kids to be trans.”

But actually, S. isn’t trans; he’s Two-Spirit, a gender recognized in Native American cultures and used for people who have both male and female spirits within them (though he tells Rolling StoneHe prefers the pronouns “he/him” to his child. He also has a child who is Two-Spirit. “So as Natives, we’re abusing our children by our culture?”He is incredulous. “That’s not right.”

The agents still came to his house. He was certain that it would be better to cooperate. He provided them with a “safe folder” he had made in fear of just such a moment — a packet of information about the family, including counselors’ letters affirming the child. He let them inspect his house and look in his fridge. They also spoke to his children. He quickly realized that the agents were just doing the job. One time, the woman said that it was amazing that they were even there. “just stupid.”The man said that he could tell his children that he loved them and that they felt safe. He also stated that they would close the case.

His family met up for dinner after the agents had left. They enjoyed chicken nuggets and broccoli as well as mac and cheese. ‘n’ cheese. He allowed the children to eat Oreos while they slept, as a consulation prize. The kids seemed fine, but S. wasn’t. “I was so shaky,”He said. “It ain’t over until you get the letter in the mail.”Even if CPS sends him a letter confirming that his case has been closed, he knows that it could be reopened at any time. “I am grateful for the workers doing the right thing and pushing back, but then again wondering if and when they might come over again,”He tells me. “It’s a witch hunt.”