Morgan Davis, a transgender man, joined Texas’ child welfare agency as an investigator to be the advocate he never had growing up.
Less than a year later, one of the first cases under Gov. Greg Abbott’s order to investigate parents of transgender children landed on his desk.
His supervisors in the Travis County office of the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services offered to reassign the case, but maybe, he thought, he was the right person for the job.
“If somebody was going to do it, I’m glad it was me,” Davis said.
He hoped it would be reassuring to the family to see a transgender man at the helm of the investigation. But the family’s lawyer didn’t see it that way.
“She said, ‘I know your intentions are good. But by walking in that door, as a representative for the state, you are saying in a sense that you condone this, that you agree with it,’” Davis said.
“It hit me like a thunderbolt. It’s true,” he said. “By me being there, for even a split second, a child could think they’ve done something wrong.”
Davis resigned shortly after. Since the directive went into effect, each member of his four-person unit has put in their notice as well.
[…]
The employees, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their jobs, said they feel conflicted — unwilling to undertake what they see as discriminatory investigations and critical of the agency’s internal response to requests for guidance, but haunted by what a mass exodus of experienced child abuse investigators would mean for the state’s most vulnerable children.
“Things are already slipping through the cracks. … We will see investigations that get closed where intervention could have occurred,” one supervisor said. “And children will die in Texas.”
We know whose fault that will be. Given the criminally abhorrent state that the foster care system is in, it’s also clear how little that Abbott and Paxton and the rest care. I could quote large swaths of this article to illustrate how monstrous this is, how deeply damaging it has been to these kids and their families, and how this already-overburdened agency will be left with fewer experienced caseworkers and investigators as a result, but you should just go read it. And be mad about it.