Confusion, secrecy marked rollout of Texas abuse investigations into transgender kids

Updated August 22, 2022 at 4:30 p.m. to include comment from Gov. Greg Abbott.

AUSTIN — Confusion and secrecy marked the rollout of the state’s decision to investigate some parents of transgender children for abuse, newly released records show.

Immediately after the directive was rolled out in late February, staff at the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services directed employees not to put anything about the controversial change in writing and urged them not to discuss it on social media.

In agency emails from Feb. 22 to March 7 that The Dallas Morning News recently obtained through a public records request, supervisors said the policy change came from the top brass and said only “high performing” employees would be tasked with handling these “special cases.”

“Please ensure we are not communicating about these cases via email and text, internally and externally, due to the sensitive nature,” the child protective investigations director for the Dallas region wrote to employees in a Feb. 24 email.

On Feb. 18, Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a nonbinding opinion defining certain kinds of gender-affirming care for minors as child abuse. Abbott, citing this opinion, directed the child protective services to investigate all reports of such care.

The decision made national headlines. Families under investigation sued the state, and the Biden administration said the policy was an attack on transgender kids. Inside child protective services, the documents released Friday show, some staffers expressed confusion — and some outright anger — over the policy change.

They peppered supervisors with questions about how to implement it. At least one threatened to resign rather than investigate a transgender child and their family.

“Everyone you need to stay off of social media with any opinions based on the following. We will be investigating these cases. This will get messy,” one supervisor wrote Feb. 25.

The agency declined to comment on the contents of the emails. Abbott’s spokesperson released a statement Monday that said his directive was “very clear and very public.”

“In a letter accompanied by a press release, the Governor directed DFPS, the state agency responsible for protecting children from abuse, to thoroughly investigate any reported instances of these abusive procedures, as it is against the law to subject Texas children to a wide variety of elective procedures for gender transitioning,” Renae Eze said. “Physically changing the sex of a child before they turn 18 years old should be evaluated to determine if it’s child abuse to ensure all Texas children are being protected.”

Medical best practices dictate that mental health care is the primary form of treatment for gender dysphoria for children who have not reached puberty, and treatments like hormones should only be considered for youths who have experienced the onset of puberty and are undergoing mental health evaluation, experts say.

Surgery is not recommended until a patient has reached the legal age of maturity to give consent for medical procedures and has lived continuously for at least a year in the gender role consistent with their gender identity, according to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, the organization that publishes the standards of care for the health of transgender and gender-nonconforming people. In Texas, this consent starts at 18.

‘Lots of feelings’

DFPS on Friday released more than 900 pages of records — mostly emails and attached documents — to The News that were written in the first two weeks after Abbott issued his directive.

In one of the emails, one of the department’s staffers wrote the governor wanted teachers, doctors and other professionals required to report child abuse “to report any parents that are encouraging/allowing/involved in allowing” transgender minors to transition.

“I know there are lots of feelings around this and more questions than answers right now. Upper management is very involved as this is totally new ground for the agency,” one agency mentor, who helps other, less-tenured investigators, wrote to a group of more than a dozen employees two days after Abbott’s directive was released.

Multiple supervisors stressed that they needed to know immediately when a report involving a transgender minor was received so the cases could be handled carefully and higher ups could be notified.

“I need to know immediately if we receive a case that meets the criteria as describe [sic] in the above attachments,” an investigations supervisor in Texarkana wrote Feb. 24. “We need to ensure our high performing workers are assigned these cases because there will be a lot of eyes on them.”

Another echoed this sentiment, noting, “We will need to discuss having a designated caseworker handle these special cases when they come up. It is being asked that these cases are worked thoroughly without text messages/emails to the family etc.”

Need for secrecy

This need for secrecy was repeated to multiple staffers. One supervisor simply wrote, “No emails or texts are allowed.”

Randa Mulanax, an investigations supervisor who resigned from the agency after the policy was rolled out, raised these concerns in February when she was testifying about the policy in court. Employees who usually have discretion on whether to open abuse investigations were told they had to do so if the report involved allegations a minor was receiving gender-affirming medical care, she testified, calling the secrecy “unethical.”

“I have always felt like, at the end of the day, the department has the children’s best interests at heart,” Mulanax said at the time. “I no longer feel this way with this order.”

Mulanax wasn’t the only employee upset about the new policy. In the emails released Friday, agency staff expressed confusion about how the governor’s directive applied to them and said the policy change could have been rolled out more effectively.

One program director threatened to resign.

“This is an infringement on civil liberties and as part of the community I refuse to punish those that are part of the community simply because they are trans,” he wrote to one of the agency’s attorneys on Feb. 24. “We have trans workers here at DFPS, what kind of message are we sending to them?”

At least one child abuse investigator who is transgender resigned due to the policy, the Texas Tribune reported.

Another investigator expressed her feelings bluntly. When she received notice her supervisor would be briefing them on the new directive, she sent a terse email to colleague.

“Effing bull poop,” she wrote.

Caught in the courts

Texas Republican politicians in recent months have placed increased attention on medical treatments for transgender youth. Last year, state lawmakers debated bills to crack down on gender-affirming health care for minors but failed to pass anything into law.

In February, ahead of the state’s most competitive GOP primary in years, Paxton issued his opinion that labeled puberty blockers and hormone therapy used to treat gender dysphoria in minors as child abuse. Gender dysphoria is the feeling of discomfort or distress that can occur in people who identify as a gender that is different from the gender or sex assigned at birth, according to the Mayo Clinic.

Abbott quickly followed the opinion by directing DFPS to investigate any reports of such treatments. At least nine investigations have been launched, and two lawsuits over the investigations followed.

The parents of a transgender teen girl, one of whom works for child protective services, were the first to take Abbott to court over the directive in March. Then, in June, the Texas Supreme Court put the investigation into that family on hold and ruled that Abbott and Paxton didn’t have the authority to order DFPS to undertake such investigations in the first place.

Investigations into two other families with trans children were paused by a Texas judge in July, although the judge delayed a decision on whether an injunction could be implemented in a broader freeze on child abuse investigations started on families who are members of the national nonprofit LGBT group PFLAG.