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Anti-Trans Politics Causes a Texas Family to Leave the State

The 2021 Legislative Session and current healthcare restrictions prompted the move.

The Texas GOP has made it an incredibly difficult year for transgender youth and their loved ones, and one Houston family is experiencing the full impact of these conservative lawmakers’ cruel political attacks.

Jae Smith, whose name has been altered to protect their family’s identity, is a nonbinary parent with a 17-year-old trans son. Smith spent several days at the Capitol last year fighting against the record number of anti-trans bills filed during the 2021 Legislative Session. One of these bills, HB 1399, would have prohibited physicians from offering gender-affirming care to trans youth.

“We heard how many voices didn’t think that our child deserved to be able to access care that is life-saving. It’s not hyperbolic to say that. Without it, I don’t know that he would be here,” Smith says, noting that every major U.S. medical association agrees that gender-affirming care for trans children is safe and medically necessary. Research shows that these treatments, including puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy (HRT), significantly lower the odds of depression and suicide among trans youth.  

Thanks to Smith and hundreds of other LGBTQ advocates, a dozen bills targeting the trans community failed. Only HB 25, which bans on trans students from joining sports teams that align with their gender identity, was signed into law.

Last year’s legislative session, and especially the public hearings for HB 1399, took a major toll on the Smiths. The family has been exploring options to leave the state, and Smith, their husband, and two children will move to Colorado in May—a decision that Smith says Texas “continues to solidify.” 

Despite multiple failed attempts to pass HB 1399 and other similar bills, Republicans have continued to push banning gender-affirming care for trans minors. On February 22, Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a 13-page nonbinding agreement stating that puberty blockers, HRT, and gender-confirmation procedures constitute a form of child abuse. One day later, Governor Greg Abbott instructed the Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) to begin investigating reports of parents providing gender-affirming medical care to their children as child abuse.

On February 28, Smith claims they were unable to pick up their son’s HRT prescription from a pharmacy. Legacy Community Health, the child’s provider for gender-affirming care, “couldn’t provide authorization for a refill.” A Legacy employee then allegedly told Smith that there was “a temporary hold on all HRT prescriptions for minors.”

Smith claims they tried contacting Legacy several times to clarify the hold, but the answers they received were unclear. The parent says they were left scrambling to find a new gender-affirming healthcare provider—a difficult process that can take over a year. 

After preparing to travel to Colorado to visit a healthcare provider who was able to treat Smith’s son on short notice, Legacy temporarily filled the child’s HRT prescription on March 2, according to Smith, but again stopped offering gender care to trans children the following day.

“We, at Legacy, understand the confusion in the community regarding the recent opinion from the Attorney General and the directive from the Governor regarding care for trans minors,” Legacy said in a March 2 social media statement. “We stand with the LGBTQ+ community and care passionately for our transgender children. Our goal is to do the best for our community, while trying to adhere to the opinion by the Attorney General during these uncertain times. The providers at Legacy are reaching out to our patients and their families impacted by the opinion. We are analyzing options and will move forward in a way that protects our patients, their families, and our staff.”

Legacy declined OutSmart’s requests for more information.

That same week, Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston announced it would no longer be providing gender-affirming treatments. “This step was taken to safeguard our healthcare professionals and impacted families from potential criminal legal ramifications,” a spokesperson for the hospital wrote in a statement. 

Emmett Schelling, the executive director of Transgender Education Network of Texas (TENT), an organization dedicated to furthering gender-diverse equality, said his organization has worked to remind healthcare providers that they have a responsibility to continue providing care to trans youth. 

“There is no law that was passed,” Schelling says. “What we’re seeing right now is an abandonment of care from a community that needs help. We need courageousness from these community entities.” 

With pressure from TENT and other organizations, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services stepped in with guidance for healthcare providers and child-welfare organizations, reminding them that denying access to healthcare because of a patient’s gender identity is illegal. Parents and youth who are having issues with a healthcare provider can report these issues by filing a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights.

Smith says Legacy is again providing gender-affirming care to trans children.

There are at least nine families across Texas facing child-abuse investigations for providing gender-affirming care to their trans children, according to the Texas Tribune. The ACLU and Lambda Legal filed a lawsuit on behalf of one such family. On March 11, a Travis County district judge ruled that the state would be prohibited from investigating anyone else for gender-affirming care until “the end of any trial.”

That evening, Paxton filed an appeal and then announced on Twitter that investigations into parents of trans children would continue. On March 21, a Texas appeals court reinstated the temporary injunction blocking the child abuse investigations.  

While it was a tough decision to make, Smith says their fifth-generation Texas family is leaving the state so that they can avoid the risk of future anti-trans attacks. 

“We’re leaving behind all of our family and friends that our children have had since they were toddlers,” Smith says. “Houston is our home, we have a lot of history here, but our state is pushing us out. We are leaving for the safety of our children. I just cannot emphasize enough what a betrayal this has been.” 

The family chose Colorado because of its LGBTQ-affirming policies and proximity to Texas, Smith says. “We were [originally] thinking about our older child, but in the past few months, our younger child also came out as nonbinary. So to get support for both of our children, we would need to be somewhere welcoming.”

Living in Colorado will be more expensive than Texas, Smith notes, and not every family with a trans child will be able to leave the state. “I have a lot of survivor’s guilt that we are leaving.”

Waiting until May to leave for Colorado has been difficult, Smith says, but it has been made easier with the support of advocacy organizations like TENT and Equality Texas. Those groups, along with other LGBTQ organizations, have been providing parents of trans kids with resources such as informational Zoom meetings and websites explaining what they need to know about Abbott’s directive to DFPS.

“If I didn’t have them, I don’t know what I would have done,” Smith says. “They have been such an incredible source of support and encouragement. They are making it possible to have hope. When people bad-mouth Texas, I tell them, ‘You don’t understand, there are [organizations like TENT and Equality Texas] working for the people here.’” 

Shelling says he wants trans children and their parents to remain hopeful about the future of Texas. “There are so many organizations working hard and around the clock to do everything we can to make sure our kids and families stay safe,” he says. “We are able to meet this moment how we need to.”

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Lourdes Zavaleta

Lourdes Zavaleta is a frequent contributor to OutSmart magazine.
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