AUSTIN, Texas — A Texas judge on Friday temporarily halted the state’s child abuse investigations into two families with transgender children, agreeing they faced immediate harm.
Travis County District Court Judge Jan Soifer granted the families’ requests for a temporary restraining order after a virtual court hearing that lasted less than an hour. In a meaningful move, the families’ lawyers said the order extends to all members of the nonprofit advocacy group for allies of LGBTQ people known as PFLAG.
Friday’s decision marks another temporary, albiet meaningful, win for transgender Texans since the state began to investigate gender-affirming care for minors as abuse earlier this year. A fourth investigation into a family with a trans teen, being litigated in a separate case, was put on hold by another judge last month and doctors at a hospital in Dallas recently won the ability to restart some treatments for new trans youth seeking gender-affirming medical care after major changes to their program in November.
“This is now the sixth time in recent months a Texas court has ruled in favor of transgender youth and their loving, supportive families,” Adri Pérez, a policy and advocacy strategist at the ACLU of Texas, said in a statement. “The court and Texans agree: weaponizing the child-welfare system against loving families causes irreparable harm.”
Earlier in the hearing, the state’s attorney confirmed it had also closed a third investigation into a family with transgender children, the Briggles of Denton, finding there was no child abuse. The Briggles case is now the first investigation into the parents of a minor receiving gender-affirming care to be publicly confirmed as closed since February, when the state targeted some of these treatments as child abuse.
The state has opened at least nine probes into families with transgender children since late February. That’s when Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a non-binding opinion that said certain treatments for gender dysphoria in minors, including puberty blockers and hormone therapy, were child abuse. Citing this opinion, Gov. Greg Abbott directed the child protective services to investigate reports of minors receiving these treatments.
The parents of a transgender teen girl, one of whom works for CPS, were the first to take Abbott to court over the directive in March. Last month, the Texas Supreme Court put the investigation into that family, known by the pseudonym Doe, on hold and ruled that Abbott and Paxton did not have the authority to force CPS to undertake these kinds of investigations. The merits of that case continues to be litigated.
However, the high court did not extend the protection they gave to the Doe family to all others in the state’s crosshairs. The decision put the control back into the hands of CPS, which soon continued several of its abuse investigations into families with trans children.
This week, three of those families filed the suit that led to Friday’s temporary restraining order.
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