Texas Court Blocks Gender Police - For Now

Note to readers:  

Your Head Trucker is a gay man, happy with his male body (though not particularly with the shape it's in at this late age); transgenderism is a very different thing, and I prefer to leave it to transgender people to speak for themselves out of their own experiences, rather than presuming to speak for them.  The same goes for lesbians and bisexuals, and all the other colors of the rainbow.  For that reason, I do not accept for myself the LGBTQI-XYZ-whatever label, which wrongly confuses several important but separate issues.  I'm just plain gay, and that's good, and that's all there is to it.  Your mileage may vary.

I will also note that according to the best research now available, transgender people are relatively few, only .3% to .6% of the adult American population - that's 3 to 6 people out of a thousand.  (Gays and lesbians are 3% of the population, or about 3 out of a hundred, which means they are about ten times more numerous than trans people.)  By a simple arithmetical operation, then, it would seem that 99.9% of the population are happy with their birth gender.  Or in other words, they are simply human beings - male and female, as it was in the beginning.  It's the exception that proves the rule.

Thus, the fashionable urge to divide the world into "cisgender" and "transgender", or even worse, to hold up "gender-neutral" as a benchmark for everyone, seems to me very much the tail wagging the dog - "cis" is an utterly needless label for me.  Others may disagree, of course.  And certainly transgender people - those who are not merely "me-too" attention-seeking wannabe-cool-kids - like the risible 20% in a recent poll, fake news if ever there was any - deserve to be true to themselves and free to be who they really are.  But not to rewrite the English language, or hold a kind of permanent veto over the 99.9%, which would only cause great resentment.  

The fabric of a liberal democracy can stretch to include many different kinds of people - but stretch it too far, and it will rip.  In some ways, it already has.

It has taken more than 50 years and much struggle for the enlightened part of society to come to terms with the concept of innate - not "chosen" - homosexuality, and it will take more time for us all to truly understand the trans experience.  Enlightenment rarely happens all at once; like a flower, it must grow and develop step by step.

However, this particular case is deeply disturbing to me, not only because it is in Texas, but also because it strikes at the heart of democratic principles and the American ideals of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" -- not to mention the "free and full development of personality" enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  

The attack is not even based on a state law, but merely the governor's edict - his whim - a prime example of dictatorial persecution, completely unconstitutional.  The sooner the courts strike down this filthy fascist attack on Texas children and parents, the better.

 

When the gender police come for your kid:  read this chilling interview with the Briggle family highlighted in the above video.  

FYI, Denton is a city in North Central Texas, 

part of the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex.

A Texas judge today blocked Texas child-abuse authorities from investigating parents of transgender children or removing those children from their homes pursuant to an order by Republican Governor Greg Abbott and a non-binding opinion issued by Attorney General Ken Paxton, whom I posted about earlier this week.  The judge set a trial date of July 11 to hear the case.  The Texas Tribune reports:

State District Judge Amy Clark Meachum ruled Friday that providing gender-affirming care is not a reason for the state to investigate a family for child abuse, and halted all such investigations. 

The statewide injunction will remain in effect until “this court, and potentially the Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court of Texas” hear the case, Meachum said.

Meachum said there is a “substantial likelihood” that lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union and Lambda Legal will prevail in getting Gov. Greg Abbott’s directive for such investigations permanently overturned, calling his actions “beyond the scope of his duty and unconstitutional.”

Vox interviewed a Houston dad earlier this week.  Excerpt:

“It’s just who they are, so we support them,” said Claudio, the father of a trans teen in Houston, who is being referred to by a pseudonym to protect his family’s privacy. “Getting tarred with the label of ‘child abuser’ for doing that is demoralizing and obviously pretty horrible.” . . .

"It’s been pretty scary. It’s been the cause of some internal family division. My wife and my kid are more defiant. 'We should fight this. This is where we live and this is the time to take a stand.' I’m a lot more of a scaredy-cat and just want to move to a different state where my children’s future is not in doubt.

My wife immediately caught on to the fact that this was a non-binding opinion from the AG that basically cascaded through the governor to child protective services. She thought at the beginning that nothing would actually happen and that it was political posturing more than anything that would have consequences, while I was pretty scared. There was a lot of anger and dispute about it. We had our differences there. 

I think to some extent we’ve both been validated. The ACLU and Lambda Legal strongly state that it is in fact a non-binding opinion and has no real weight and they’re contesting it in court. We’re watching the court cases hanging off the edge of our seat, of course. But at the same time, child protective services has started investigations, famously this one of their own employees, which has super ugly overtones. 

There is part of me that is just scared that the gender police is going to come knocking on my door. We’re scared, and we’re frustrated and we’re very sad that this is happening in our home. . . .

But I don’t know how much risk we’re going to be willing to take, so at some point, we might decide to cut our losses and pick up and leave [Texas]. We don’t want to, but my family left Europe after World War II, after they were [targeted] by the Nazis, and that’s a lesson that gets etched in your brain pretty strongly even through generations. Persecution scares you extra.

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