Abbot Directs Texas To Consider Investigating Teachers Who Support Trans Kids For Child Abuse

Texas lawmakers want educators who allegedly used a child’s name and pronouns to be investigated by law enforcement.

Greg Abbott // Wikimedia Commons

An anonymous claim alleging that teachers in Texas might have used a trans student’s preferred name and pronouns has invoked the wrath of Governor Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton — opening the floodgates for legal action against any teacher who supports their LGBTQ students.

The scrummage began when Denise Bell, an activist with Moms for Liberty — an anti-government, anti-LGBTQ rights group — read a statement, supposedly on behalf of the unnamed complainant, to the Houston Independent School District board on February 13.

“Multiple teachers started calling [this student] by a different name and pronouns,” Bell said. “This occurred without [the parent’s] knowledge and certainly without our consent. This goes against our Christian faith, the advice of [their] therapist and quite frankly common sense.”

She ended the speech with a pronounced allegation: “HISD is purposely and secretively transitioning minors.”

There is no public evidence to support this claim, but this has not stopped Governor Abbott from sinking his teeth into the high school in question. On March 13, 2025, he sent a letter to State Representative Steve Toth, a Republican who does not represent the district of the high school where the incident took place.

Toth seemingly flagged the incident with Governor Abbott, and Abbott thanked him for “highlighting the inappropriate, and potentially unlawful” actions of educators. Abbott then said the Texas Education Agency would launch a probe into the district with law enforcement “to determine whether a student at Bellaire High School has been subjected to abuse or neglect,” and that they would “consider rulemaking to reaffirm that socially transitioning students or encouraging students to transition will result in disciplinary action and may require schools to report and investigate such actions for child abuse or neglect.”

Abbott’s memo quoted case law which decreed that “[a] child is not a mere creature of the state” and that “custody, care and nurture of the child reside[s] first with the parents.” In this case, he says, by using the child’s pronouns, teachers are “violating the express wishes of the child’s mother,” who purportedly does not support the child’s trans identity.

“No school should be ‘transitioning’ children,” Abbott wrote. “Parental rights are not stripped once a child enters a classroom.”

In 1969, Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas said something in a similar vein — that neither students nor teachers “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate,” as per the landmark Tinker v. Des Moines decision. This ruling serves as foundational First Amendment case law in scholastic settings.

Meanwhile, in 2022, Abbott also issued a directive mandating that the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services investigate parents who support their trans children for child abuse. In other words, the Governor seems to support parental rights, until it comes to a parent’s right to provide their child with evidence-based, life-saving medical care.

At the HISD hearing, the Moms for Liberty’s activist was flanked by Emelie Schmidt, a self-proclaimed “detransitioner” in her mid-twenties, who made similar claims about teachers in another part of Texas. When she asked her old high school teachers to use a new name and pronouns for her, she said some of them obliged.

Schmidt’s district is also not part of HISD, but Schmidt has become a fixture of the Texas anti-trans movement in recent years. She has traveled from district to district preaching anti-trans rhetoric and made appearances at committee hearings at the State Capitol, according to HoustonPress.

Neither Schmidt’s school nor HISD prescribed any children with hormones or surgical procedures at any time. No teacher in either situation is accused of forcing students to socially or medically transition.

Studies show that allowing a child to socially transition, even if they do change their gender identity later on, is a net good for their health and wellbeing.

“There is no evidence that social transition per se leads to unnecessary medical transition,” bioethicist Dr. Simona Giordano wrote in an article in the Journal of Medical Ethics. “Social transition should be viewed as a tool to find out what is the right trajectory for the particular child.”

Meanwhile, the representative who submitted the incident to the Governor, Rep. Toth, joined Rep. Nate Schatzline — the state legislator behind the proposed drag restrictions in 2022 — for a recent interview with TMZ. They promoted a state bill that would levy penalties against people who commit “gender identity fraud” by making it illegal to identify as trans on official documents, as per NBC.

“This does not criminalize in any way, shape, or form, being trans,” Toth said of the bill, which carries potential felony charges and jailtime for trans people. “If you want to be trans, you're an adult, you're 26 years old, you want to be trans, this doesn't do anything to criminalize it.” (The bill makes no references to a person’s age.)

Toth also asserted, seemingly without evidence, that trans people are exploiting name and gender marker changes in order to evade the sex offender registry. Harvey Levin, the founder of TMZ, pushed back on the premise. “What is the value or purpose in having them disclose their biological status of birth?”

Toth said they had “heard from multiple law enforcement sources” that trans people updating their documents makes it “nearly impossible” to track sex offenders on the state registry. There is no publicly available evidence to suggest that this is happening.

“So if Caitlyn Jenner says, ‘Yes, I was born a man,’” Levin said. “How does that help you determine if Caitlyn Jenner is a predator?”’

Toth said, “You’re missing the point,” before calling trans people mentally ill.

Even Levin was skeptical. “Does it seem a little draconian to you that you would take what you consider to be a ‘mentally ill person’ and imprison them because their ‘mental illness,’ the way you see it, leads them to answer a question that you think is deceptive? That the remedy would be to make them a felon and put them in prison?”

“We only have compassion and love for anyone that's going through this,” Toth said.

Levin pushes back. “You’d put them in prison,” he said.