(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) Texas plans to investigate and possibly prosecute sex reassignment surgery as child abuse, The Daily Wire reported.
Governor Greg Abbott directed the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) to investigate so-called “transition” procedures found to “constitute child abuse under existing Texas law.”
“[I]t is already against the law to subject Texas children to a wide variety of elective procedures for gender transitioning, including reassignment surgeries that can cause sterilization, mastectomies, removals of otherwise healthy body parts, and administration of puberty-blocking drugs or supraphysiologic doses of testosterone or estrogen,” Abbott wrote in a letter to DFPS.
“Texas law also imposes a duty on DFPS to investigate the parents of a child who is subjected to these abusive gender-transitioning procedures, and on other state agencies to investigate licensed facilities where such procedures may occur,” he said.
These aggressive policy moves come as transgenderism becomes a more controversial issue among state governments.
Arkansas was the first to ban surgeries of this kind, with a number of states taking action to ban biological males from competing in female sports.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has ruled that some transgender operations, when done on children, constitute child abuse.
“Genital mutilation of a child through reassignment surgery is child abuse, subject to all rules and procedures pertaining to child abuse,” DFPS Commissioner Jaime Masters wrote in a letter at the time. “Such mutilation may cause a ‘genuine threat of substantial harm from physical injury to the child’ [according to Texas law],”
“This surgical procedure physically alters a child’s genitalia for non-medical purposes potentially inflicting irreversible harm to children’s bodies.”