What a scumbag he is.
When the case worker asked to inspect the house, Amber and Adam Briggle first led her to the kitchen. They opened the cabinets to show they were full of food.
They moved on to the dining room. Every Sunday the Briggles and their two kids, now 14 and 9, sit in those chairs for dinner and talk about gymnastics or their new purple hair. It was around the dining room table where, six years earlier, Attorney General Ken Paxton and his wife, Angela, sat with the Briggle family eating steak kabobs and watermelon. But last month, Paxton issued a nonbinding legal opinion that gender-affirming health care for transgender kids, like the Briggles’ son, constitutes child abuse. Shortly after, Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) to investigate the parents of trans kids.
The Dallas-area family now says it is under investigation and at risk of losing the kids.
“When we were notified of the allegations, it was as if the wind had been knocked out of us. We wanted to scream and cry, but we had no air,” the couple wrote in a statement approved by their lawyer. “Raising a transgender child in Texas has been one long political emergency.”
Briggle said she learned of the investigation February 28, when she found a sticky note on her desk at the massage studio she owns saying she had missed an urgent private call. She assumed it was from another parent of a trans kid looking for advice. When she called the number, the woman on the line informed her that she was a Child Protective Services investigator, and she was 30 minutes away from the Briggle home.
The next 30 minutes went by in a blur, Briggle said. She managed to reach Adam, and they got family attorney Ian Pittman on the phone. They convinced the investigator to meet them at Briggle’s office. She would schedule another meeting for that Wednesday at the house.
“We told the children that they have the right to not answer questions,” the couple wrote in a statement. “We told them that the government is trying to spy on us even though we have done nothing wrong.”
[…]
In the meantime, families like the Briggles have been working feverishly to secure attorneys who will work pro bono, testimonials from friends and family, and home studies for a “safe folder,” an emergency packet of documents to demonstrate their parenting skills. The Briggles have filed a federal complaint against the state, Adam Briggle said.
“The Texas government has launched an effort to round up transgender children and send them off to a broken, overcrowded, and dysfunctional foster care system,” the Briggles wrote.
Last year, the legislature failed to pass a bill that would have labeled gender-affirming medical care as child abuse. Briggle testified against that bill. The couples say their family has been the subject of death threats and harassment ever since.
The family is terrified of speaking up about the investigation now, they said. But the couple is prepared to flee the state, and they worry that if no parents speak up, other trans kids will also face removal.
Adam is a tenured professor. Briggle owns a business. Both kids have a lot of friends. Leaving Texas would destroy their lives, they said.
“I really think that we need to start a contingency plan of that nature,” Adam said.
“If we have to become political refugees in our own country, then that’s what we do,” Briggle added. “But I don’t know where it’s safe.”
I wrote about the Paxtons’ dinner with the Briggles at the time. I did not believe that the Briggles’ generosity would have any effect on the Paxtons, and I’m sad to have been right about that. I can’t imagine what the Briggle family is going through right now. Just seeing them talk about the possibility of leaving the state is breathtaking, given that Amber Briggle was saying this on the same day that story was published:
Whatever the Briggles decide to do, they’re not the only parents who are thinking of fleeing. I can’t even type things like that without wanting to scream. If we’re lucky, there will be a statewide injunction against this cruel policy as soon as today. But that will be appealed, and who knows what happens after that. We also know that losing in court is not going to stop the Republicans, who are all in on hating transgender people now. I’ve said it many times, they’re going to have to lose elections over this. Like, a lot of elections. That’s not going to be easy. The Briggle family is out there doing their part. We all have to do ours.
This is a good start, if a belated one.
Sixty-five major U.S. companies who do business in Texas are calling on Gov. Greg Abbott to reverse his order requiring the state’s child welfare agency to investigate gender-affirming care for transgender youth as a form of child abuse by their parents.
The companies, including Apple, Dow, Google, Johnson & Johnson, Meta and PayPal, in conjunction with the LGBT advocacy nonprofit Human Rights Campaign took out full-page print and digital advertisements in the Dallas Morning News that state in all capital, bold letters: “Discrimination is bad for business.”
“The recent attempt to criminalize a parent for helping their transgender child access medically necessary, age-appropriate health care in the state of Texas goes against the values of our companies,” they wrote. “This policy creates fear for employees and their families, especially those with transgender children, who might now be faced with choosing to provide the best possible medical care for their children but risk having those children removed by child protective services for doing so.”
So far, there are nine new CPS investigations statewide involving parents who are supporting their children’s medical care, said Patrick Crimmins, spokesperson for the state Department of Families and Protective Services. But advocates and lawyers say even just the fear of an investigation is putting immense stress on Texas families with transgender children.
Good for them, but there are a lot more companies that do business in Texas. Where are they? As that Trib story I linked to above points out, the Republican animosity towards the transgender community (as well as some other social issues) has caused a rift between them and their longtime benefactors in the business world, because they care about homophobia and transphobia and “critical race theory” and voter suppression so much more. When is the business community going to recognize this and start acting accordingly?
As a reminder, this is the system that Abbott and Paxton want to put these children into.
Employees at a state-contracted foster care facility established to help female victims of sex trafficking were instead trafficking the children staying there, state officials said Thursday.
The Bastrop operation, called The Refuge, has served 11 children ages 11 to 17. State officials began receiving reports of sexual abuse at the facility in late January, when a staffer alleged that a former employee had sold nude photos of two young girls and used the money to purchase illegal drugs and alcohol for them.
More accusations were made in the following weeks, and state investigators discovered that several staffers still employed at The Refuge were involved in the criminal activity. In total, there are seven alleged victims and nine alleged perpetrators, state officials said at an emergency court hearing Thursday afternoon.
All of the children were finally removed from the facility on Wednesday. One staff member has been arrested, and additional criminal charges are expected, officials said.
“The most appalling thing about this is the disregard of these children and you had to wait to get eight calls before you took 11 female already-trafficked children out of this trafficking situation,” said U.S. District Judge Janis Jack, who has overseen a decade-long lawsuit over the state’s foster care conditions. “This is a system that remains broken.”
The matter came to light Thursday, after the state Department of Family and Protective Services notified court-appointed monitors of the “urgent situation” at The Refuge. Jack blasted state officials for withholding the information from the monitors for several weeks, and for failing to remove the children after the first reports of abuse.
Emphasis mine. Such a commitment to “protecting” children Abbott and Paxton have. Maybe this should be a bigger story? I’m just saying. The Trib has more.
One more thing:
My family has personal experience with evidence-based gender-affirming health care at Texas Children’s Hospital. An amazing team of professionals lovingly guided us through a process that involved months of discernment with an incredible array of best-in-the-world physicians, social workers and mental health professionals. And our child’s quality of life immediately improved. Everything we did was medically necessary. We cannot imagine the devastation we would feel at being told “our lawyers say we cannot provide the medically necessary health care you desperately need.”
Last week, Texas Children’s announced that it would halt gender-affirming procedures. The hospital leaders should know that this is exactly the result Rep. Matt Krause, Attorney General Ken Paxton and Gov. Greg Abbott hoped would occur with their thinly-veiled circumvention of the democratic process: chaos and fearful reactions.
[…]
Abbott not only used Paxton’s legal opinion but misrepresented it to instruct the state to investigate families. In his letter to Department of Family and Protective Services Commissioner Jaime Masters, Abbott states that the attorney general determined that the gender-affirming health care procedures about which Krause inquired “constitute child abuse under existing Texas law.” Abbott completely ignored the express limitations in Paxton’s opinion. As a former Texas attorney general himself and a former justice on the Texas Supreme Court, it is fair to assume Abbott understands the difference. Frankly, the sheer political expedience of his actions seriously endangering the lives of the very children he should be protecting is beyond reprehensible — it is diabolical.
Finally, the simple truth is that Texas Children’s Hospital has allowed the Abbott/Paxton scheme to work by failing to stand up for the right of physicians (not politicians) to determine the medical standards of care for transgender youth. The hospital explanation was that it made the decision to halt care “to safeguard our healthcare professionals and impacted families from potential criminal legal ramifications.” While it is wrong for politicians in Austin to decide what the medical standard of care should be, it is also wrong for lawyers rather than physicians at the leading clinical and teaching children’s hospital in the world — located in the Texas Medical Center of Houston, literally the apex of medicine — to determine standards of medical care.
More importantly, the hospital has missed this opportunity to stand up for their patients. The hospital has left families like ours out in the cold and dashed the hopes of transgender kids just wanting to be their authentic selves.
Instead of using lawyers to dictate medical standards of care, put them to use in the legal arena fighting for medical independence of physicians and the rights of your patients. Don’t succumb, fight back. File a petition in intervention or an amicus brief in support of the lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Texas and Lambda Legal. Show up. Be courageous. Make the voices of the best medical experts in the world heard on these issues. Your silence is deafening.
See here for the background. Whether we get that statewide injunction or not, I agree with this. Texas Children’s Hospital, the other hospitals that have halted gender affirming care, the physicians who treat trans kids, the Texas Medical Association, all of them and more should be doing their part to fight back. If not now, then when?
