Texas anti-trans laws target intersex people, too

In February, Governor Greg Abbott directed the state Department of Family and Protective Services to launch child abuse investigations into parents who seek gender-affirming healthcare for their transgender children, based on an opinion released from Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office. Currently, a lower district court has ordered a stay on such investigations while the Texas Supreme Court decides whether Governor Abbott had the authority to require them. Currently, 15 states have imposed restrictions on youth seeking gender-affirming health care. Last year, Arkansas became the first state to ban gender-affirming care for trans kids outright. Alabama followed suit earlier this month, making it a felony for doctors to administer puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and surgery for transgender youth. In Florida, the Department of Health released a memo recommending that minors should not receive gender-affirming care. Lawmakers have justified these measures by saying that children who receive these treatments are not old enough to consent to them and that they may cause irreparable harm.

At the same time that these bills ban gender-affirming care for trans kids, they carve out exceptions to allow doctors to continue to perform medically unnecessary treatments on intersex infants intended to make them fit into the categories of male and female—long before they are old enough to express any form of gender identity. “Intersex” is an umbrella term for people who exhibit variations in sex characteristics that do not fit the two most common paths of human sex development. “Transgender,” meanwhile, denotes a person whose sex characteristics fall into the binary but later chooses to identify as a different gender. The Alabama law states that it “does not apply to a procedure undertaken to treat a minor born with a medically verifiable disorder of sex development.” Ken Paxton’s opinion states that “some children have a medically verifiable genetic disorder of sex development” for whom the procedures barred for transgender kids are “medically necessary.” The Florida memo refers to intersex children as minors with “a genetically or biochemically verifiable disorder of sex development” and contains caveats to ensure that hormone treatments and surgery can continue to be administered to them. Alicia Roth Weigel advocates for intersex and transgender rights and is a partner with the Pride Fund, a venture firm that supports LGBTQ+ businesses. She identifies as intersex and has been living with the consequences of medically unnecessary surgery performed on her when she was just an infant. “[Forced] surgeries are not happening to trans kids, but they are happening to intersex kids,” Weigel said. “What I’m hoping is that this can be an opportunity for people to see the hypocrisy of this and understand that every time that they are attacking trans kids, they are also inherently attacking intersex kids through these subtle, covert, hidden clauses.”