Lambda Legal and ACLU Blast Texas AG’s Continued Attack on Families of Transgender Youth

Lambda Legal and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) today condemned Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for continuing his unrelenting attack on transgender Texas youth and the families and medical professionals who love and care for them.

The Travis County District Court granted a statewide temporary injunction Friday that prevented Gov. Greg Abbott and the Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) from implementing a new directive that ordered DFPS to investigate parents who work with medical professionals to provide their adolescent transgender children with medically necessary treatment. It also bars prosecuting any reports of abuse based solely on a youth’s receipt of gender-affirming care and imposing any reporting requirements on people facilitating, providing, or even aware of a youth’s receipt of such care.

Paxton immediately appealed that injunction to the Texas 3rd Court of Appeals and is publicly claiming that the injunction preventing them from taking action against families and healthcare providers is frozen.

Lambda Legal and the ACLU issued the following statement:

"In his zealousness to persecute trans youth and their families, Attorney General Paxton has appealed the injunction we secured Friday and argues that the judge’s order restraining the governor and DFPS from investigating parents simply for providing gender-affirming care to their children and from taking action against healthcare providers who refuse to report on these families is frozen. We consider the appeal baseless. Just like the State’s appeal dismissed earlier this week, we do not believe that this new appeal has any merit or that it should affect whether the injunction can remain in place. The court’s decision makes clear how harmful and lawless the state’s actions are, and we will fight to ensure the properly issued injunction remains in place.

“In the meantime, it would be unconscionable for DFPS to enforce now a directive that, as testimony Friday from the parent of a transgender child made clear, is terrorizing children and parents and even leading some families to leave the state. If any family is contacted by DFPS notwithstanding the court’s decision, they should contact Lambda Legal’s Help Desk immediately.”

The ruling came at the end of a day-long hearing on Friday in a lawsuit filed on behalf of two parents — a DFPS employee and her spouse with a transgender child — and Dr. Megan Mooney, a licensed psychologist who is considered a mandatory reporter under Texas law and cannot comply with the governor’s directive without harming her clients and violating her ethical obligations.

The lawsuit was filed by Lambda Legal, the American Civil Liberties Union Jon L. Stryker and Slobodan Randjelović LGBTQ & HIV Project, the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, the ACLU of Texas, and the law firm of Baker Botts LLP.

Read more about the case here: https://www.lambdalegal.org/in-court/cases/doe-v-abbott