Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s order to investigate gender-affirming care was years in the making. strawburriez reports on the state's efforts to make its foster-care system as inimical as possible to trans children
Demonstrators in Austin protest a Texas policy to regard gender-affirming treatments for transgender youth as “child abuse,” March 1, 2022. Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Christopher Lee/The New York Times/REDUX This story was produced in partnership with The Garrison Project, an independent, nonpartisan organization addressing the crisis of mass incarceration and policing.
Still, DFPS has opened at least nine investigations into the parents of trans children. The nation’s largest pediatric hospital, Texas Children’s in Houston, said it was pausing gender therapy at its medical centers due to the governor’s order.
Foster care is tough on every child who experiences it, but for LGBTQ youth it’s worse, since they are more likely to experience incarceration, homelessness, and sexual violence. Partly because they are rejected by their parents, LGBTQ kids and particularly trans kids are vastly overrepresented in the foster-care system; one 2014 study focused on Los Angeles found that there were up to double the number of trans foster youth than there were trans youth in the general population.
One of Catizia’s first foster placements was a boys’ home in Mountain Home, Texas, an hour and a half from her native San Antonio. They took the clothes she loved so much and gave her standard-issue sweats. She said she was growing her thick black hair long — what she described as “my everything” — but staff shaved her head as the boys looked on. They told her they were going to toughen her up. Each day, in her few moments alone, Catizia cried in the shower.
When Catizia was 15, she met Lauryn Farris, and her life changed. Lauryn was a transgender woman who came out in her 40s, and as she embraced her true self, she became an outspoken advocate for trans rights in San Antonio. Catizia at the time was struggling at another institutional home. She was living fully as a girl then, at a conservative high school where people made fun of her for being a “tranny.” Back at the home, she still lived with the boys, and even had a boy roommate.
While the bathroom bill failed that year, another bill passed both houses and was signed into law. HB 3859 carved out a religious exemption for child-welfare providers that did not want to provide their services to LGBTQ people. Contemporaneous news articles focused on how the law would affect LGBTQ couples who were looking to foster and/or adopt children, since many of the child-placing agencies contracted by the state are religious. But the law didn’t stop there.
It would seem the Christian right has powerful allies on this issue. In 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Catholic Social Services in a dispute in which they claimed they were being discriminated against, after Philadelphia pulled its contracts for refusing to license LGBTQ couples for adoption. Currey Cook, the Lambda Legal attorney, says the whole system has been turned on its head.
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