SAN ANTONIO – Bexar County District Attorney Joe Gonzales joined four other Texas district attorneys in defying recent directives issued by Gov. Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton on transgender health care.
Earlier this week, Paxton issued an attorney general opinion, which is not legally binding, that deemed gender-affirming treatments for children would constitute child abuse.
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Abbott cited that opinion in a letter to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, directing the agency to investigate gender-affirming care providers.
The district attorneys of Dallas, Travis, Bexar, Nueces and Fort Bend counties condemned the directive, calling it “un-American.”
“We also want to be clear: we will enforce the Constitution and will not irrationally and unjustifiably interfere with medical decisions made between children, their parents, and their medical physicians,” the attorneys wrote. “We trust the judgment of our state’s medical professionals, who dedicate themselves to providing the highest degree of care not only for our transgender youth, but for all youth in our communities.”
The DAs assured families with transgender children that they should continue seeking health care for them.
“We will not allow the Governor and Attorney General to disregard Texan children’s lives in order to score political points,” they wrote.
Gonzales released his own statement on Thursday, further explaining his position.
“The logic employed in the opinion directly contradicts decades of generally accepted medical care,” Gonzales wrote. “It also ignores the reality that necessary life-saving medical care is not child abuse.”
The Democratic district attorneys have been at odds with the governor and attorney general over many issues over the past few years, including fights over mask mandates and other restrictions related to COVID-19.
The Texas attorney general’s ability to unilaterally prosecute cases is also unclear.
Late last year, the state’s highest criminal court ruled that Paxton could not unilaterally prosecute election cases without a referral from a county or district attorney first.