The government of Texas is seemingly at war with trans children. In 2021, the Texas Legislature saw more than 40 proposed bills that pushed anti-trans rhetoric, the most in the country. This included a bill signed into law by Governor Abbott that restricted trans youth from participating in school sports. The latest attack on trans children came in February, right before early voting started in the Republican primaries on March 1.

In February 2022, Governor Greg Abbott penned a letter instructing Texas state agencies to begin investigating parents who allow their children to receive gender-affirming care for charges of child abuse. The governor also announced that “doctors, nurses, and teachers” as well as “members of the general public” would be required to report children who “may be subject to such abuse.” This directive essentially turns the Texas public into a vigilante force against trans children and their families, creating unsafe spaces for a group that already faces significant threat from their communities and peers.

How vile does one have to be to harm children? It is genuinely evil to cause parents to fear losing their child purely because they desire necessary medical treatment for their kid, and even more so to force children to fear being taken away from their parents. It is simply nauseating to watch an elected official, who has been tasked with the protection of the people of this state, attack trans youth, one of Texas’s most vulnerable groups.

Despite claims of “protecting our children,” it is clear that this new directive would do the exact opposite. In 2021, the Trevor Project reported that more than half of transgender and nonbinary youth seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year. In fact, according to the CDC, the rate of suicide attempt for transgender youth is around three times higher than the rate among cisgender youth. Access to gender-affirming care, such as the pubertal suppression treatment that Abbott’s directive is labeling child abuse, has been proven to significantly lower the odds of suicidal ideation.