Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot is one of five Texas DAs who today issued a statement condemning recent actions by AG Ken Paxton and Gov. Greg Abbott targeting trans youth and their families.
In the wake of actions earlier this week by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Gov. Greg Abbott targeting transgender youth and their families, and group of five district attorneys from around the state today (Feb. 24) released a joint statement condemning what they called Abbott’s and Paxton’s “anti-trans and life-threatening directives.”
DAs signing the statement are John Creuzot from Dallas County, José Garza from Travis County, Joe Gonzales from Bexar County and Mark Gonzalez from Nueces County. All five are Democrats; both Paxton and Abbott are Republicans, and both are in the midst of hotly-contested primary races.
On Monday, Feb. 21, Paxton issued an “opinion” declaring that gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth under 18 is legally child abuse, and on Tuesday, Feb. 22, Abbott sent a letter ordering the Department of Family and Protective Services to begin investigating any reports of minors undergoing “elective procedures for gender transitioning” and for “licensed professionals” including doctors, nurses and teachers and “members of the general public” to report parents providing their minor trans children with gender-affirming health care. Abbott included a warning that state law “provides criminal penalties for failure to report such child abuse.”
rans advocates and allies have accused both Abbott and Paxton of using cheap political tricks to try to rally extreme right-wing voters to back them in the GOP Primary. Legal experts have weighed in on the matter, noting that Paxton’s opinion is just that — his opinion — and that it has no weight of law, and that Abbott’s directive is unconstitutional and legally unenforceable.
The statement signed by the five DAs backs up those legal experts. The statement reads:
“We are deeply disturbed by Gov. Abbott and Attorney General Paxton’s cruel directives treating transgender children’s access to life-saving, gender-affirming care as ‘child abuse.’ This is part of a continued onslaught on personal freedoms. Elected officials should be protecting our most vulnerable. These two, instead, want to irrationally target and restrain children seeking medical assistance — and force caregivers to participate.
“This is un-American. We cannot stand silent in the face of such an egregious invasion of privacy.
“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. 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.
“We want to assure our residents with transgender children that they are safe to continue seeking the care their children need. We will not allow the governor and attorney general to disregard Texan children’s lives in order to score political points.
“We have a choice: We can launch politically motivated attacks, or we can lift up and protect communities. We are proud to do the latter.”
It is also worth noting that in November 2021, officials at Children’s Medical center in Dallas announced the hospital was disbanding GENECIS, its groundbreaking treatment clinic for transgender youth. Many advocates believe the hospital was forced to close the clinic under pressure from Republican elected officials who may have threatened the hospital’s funding.
— Tammye Nash