Texas Child Abuse Investigators Told to Make Transgender Cases a Priority
HOUSTON — Child abuse investigators in Texas have been told to prioritize cases involving the parents of transgender children and to investigate them without exception, after the state’s governor ordered certain medical care to be treated as abuse, an investigations supervisor said during a court hearing on Friday.
The supervisor, Randa Mulanax of the Department of Family and Protective Services, testified that the agency was not given the freedom to determine that a given report involving a transgender child was likely not in fact a case of child abuse — so-called “priority none” status — and that investigators were not able to close the cases. “I’ve been told about that directly,” said Ms.
Mulanax, who has submitted her resignation to the department. “You cannot priority-none these cases.” According to Ms. Mulanax, reports of parents possibly providing puberty-blockers, hormones or other medically accepted treatments to their transgender children were being handled differently from other reports of child abuse.
In addition to investigating them without exception, she said, the agency’s staff was told to not put anything about the cases in writing. “These are not being treated the same,” Ms.
