The Texas Stasi
Civilian surveillance targets parents of trans kids. No matter your politics, that should worry you.
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With new guidance requiring a whole slew of workers to report the affirming parents of trans kids for child abuse, coming on the heels of a law allowing any random vigilante to report anyone who helps a woman have an abortion, Texas is truly distinguishing itself as the snitchiest state in a snitch-filled nation.
Texas governor Greg Abbott announced this week that any medically affirming care for transgender adolescents will be considered child abuse and should be reported to Child Protective Services. Mandated reporters — teachers, doctors, nurses — will be required to rat out trans kids who are getting treatment and parents who support them; all other adults are being encouraged to report trans-affirming families, too. CPS could take trans kids away from their parents. Parents who help their trans kids get care could face criminal penalties for child abuse if, for example, they agree with a medical care team that their child should be allowed to use puberty blockers or hormones. And mandated reporters who don’t rat out parents and kids could also face criminal prosecution.
Barring trans kids from getting the care they need flies in the face of the recommendations from most major health organizations. It’s dangerous: Refusing gender-affirming care is tied to a whole slew of mental health problems, up to and including suicide.
But even if you are skeptical or hostile to gender-affirming treatment for adolescents — a position I don’t agree with, but one that is widely held, even among some on the left, and certainly among many on the right — this law should appall you.
A cohesive society needs some baseline level of public trust. The police states of Nazi Germany, East Germany, and Soviet Russia were corrosive because so many individual citizens were imprisoned or killed without due process, but also because of how the governments created a vast network of citizen spies and snitches who regularly ratted each other out and bred widespread (justified) paranoia. Citizens didn’t just fear an oppressive and totalitarian government; they feared their neighbors, their relatives, their friends. This is the case in some authoritarian states today (hello, China), but in the US, we have long prided ourselves on freedom: A commitment to free speech and expression, an allergy to civilian surveillance.
Or so we say. That has, obviously, not always been the reality on the ground, particularly in the American south. Slave patrols were the original cops and old-fashioned snitch networks. Vigilantes, empowered or excused by the state to target their fellow citizens, lynched African Americans and also murdered Natives, Chinese people, and immigrants. The surveillance state in the US has its roots in slavery.
We are not, in other words, nearly as free a nation as we like to believe. But we have been on a slow and unsteady walk toward living freer lives, at least some of the time, even while we’ve reinvented and renamed various surveillance and policing apparatuses to make the same bad old things more palatable (and even while we’re voluntarily accepted astounding intrusions into our private lives so long as technology makes it easy). Our history informs our present, and I don’t think you can really understand the Texas laws on abortion and trans teenagers without understanding how surveillance and government-sanctioned snitching has long worked against vulnerable communities in the US. And yet our national ideal is, laudably, one of freedom from the kind of oppressive police states that are most deeply etched into our historical memories — even if we don’t quite live up to it.
Which is why, no matter where you fall on the political spectrum, you should oppose laws like Texas’s — assuming you fall somewhere to the left of fascism. We know that civilian surveillance and a culture of snitching on your neighbor has widely damaging effects. East Germans who lived in areas with a higher density of spies wound up poorer, less likely to be employed, and less trusting in their fellow citizens and in their post-reunification government. Decades later, distrust still persists. The culture of self-censorship and fear that permeated East Germany was a real impediment to democratic transition.
Gov. Abbott and Texas Republicans are bringing that same culture of fear to their state, and other conservative politicians are following in their footsteps. You don’t have to be supportive of abortion rights or trans rights to see the danger in a citizenry broadly empowered or even compelled to snitch on their neighbors for engaging in entirely well-meaning acts that health experts and doctors often agree is totally appropriate. If you think abortion should be illegal or that giving trans adolescents puberty blockers is wrong, that’s certainly your right. But the enforcement mechanism matters, and Texas is moving outside of the realm of transparency and due process with clear lines between and different obligations for state law enforcement and citizens, and into the realm of vigilantism. Abbott’s directive to report parents who support their own children in making complex medical decisions with the guidance and supervision of a doctor relies partly on the legal system for enforcement — there are potential criminal penalties for mandated reporters who don’t snitch, as well as for the parents who are snitched on — but it also relies on Child Protective Services and the judgment of a hodgepodge of social workers and state employees. There is little due process in that system, even though the stakes could not be higher. Under the Abbott directive, a parent who is doing the best they can for their child — a parent who is listening to their doctors and many of the experts in the field of trans health care, a parent who may themselves be struggling to figure out the best path forward for a vulnerable kid in crisis — could be branded a child abuser and have their kid taken away from them.
The threat of this law isn’t just to trans kids who need health care. It’s a threat to anyone who helps them. The abortion law that similarly bypasses the criminal justice system and allows vigilantes to sue anyone who helps a person end a pregnancy isn’t just a threat to people seeking abortions. It’s a threat to anyone who helps them.
You couldn’t invent laws better structured to breed distrust and fear, and to incentivize the isolation and stigmatization of people who are struggling in some of the most delicate and vulnerable moments of their lives.
It’s frustrating, to put it mildly, to see many of the same people who claim concern about free speech and “cancel culture” either ignore or even support laws that are aggressive broadsides against freedoms, and even more infuriating to see the people who broadly support a parent’s right to control their children’s lives suddenly claim the mantle of protecting kids. I would bet that there is significant overlap between those who support parental consent and notification laws for abortion — laws that essentially allow parents to force their daughters to give birth, premised on the claim that parents should have veto power over their children’s medical decisions — and those who also support the Texas directive to report parents who consent to getting their kids gender-affirming care. I would bet that many of the same people who support this Texas directive would also argue that corporal punishment is acceptable, or at least shouldn’t be outlawed — that working with your kid’s doctor to come up with a gender-affirming care plan for them is child abuse, but hitting your child as a form of punishment is not.
Corporal punishment — hitting and hurting your child — is not illegal in Texas. Working with doctors and specialists to help a trans child manage their transition and hopefully avoid the many devastating effects of living with gender dysmorphia is — and you can go to jail for it. Parents in Texas have wide latitude to refuse to educate their children, to demand that they give birth against their will, to refuse them life-saving vaccinations, to beat them. A parent’s “freedom” routinely infringes on a child’s rights, including the child’s basic right to physical safety. But now, perversely, parents don’t have a right to work with a team of medical experts to make the private health care decisions that they believe are in the best interest of their child.
The Texas trans snitch law isn’t about protecting kids from abuse. It’s about imposing an ideological agenda on all Texas families, to the detriment of a great many struggling young people.
These snitch laws are broadly corrosive. They create a million little tears in the social fabric of a nation. Whatever you think about abortion rights or trans rights or the rights of children, I hope you understand that the how matters. It matters how these laws are structured. It matters to the question what kind of society we want to build, even if we don’t all see eye to eye on policy. And I would hope that most of us don’t want to live in a society marked by civilian surveillance and the distrust and paranoia it brings.
xx Jill
Photo by Alexander Schimmeck on Unsplash