A poll from the University of Houston found that a majority of Texans would support legislation defining child sex alteration surgery as child abuse.
Rep. Bryan Slaton (R-Royse City) has filed legislation to list a wide variety of actions sometimes taken “to change or affirm a child’s perception of the child’s sex” as abuse.
Some of these items proposed for reclassification include “castration, vasectomy, hysterectomy, oophorectomy, metoidioplasty, orchiectomy, penectomy, phalloplasty, and vaginoplasty.”
The survey, conducted by the Hobby School of Public Affairs earlier this month, found that 57% of respondents supported proposals to classify child sex modification as abusive, effectively banning the practice.
When broken up by political affiliation, Democrats were the only group not to support the idea by a supermajority, with only 36% backing it. The proposal was approved by 73% of Republicans and 67% of independents.
Respondents who had a child under the age of 18 still living at home concurred with defining the practice as child abuse 68% of the time, while only 52% of those without a minor at home thought the same.
Along a similar line, 65% of citizens within the state thought it should be illegal for people to change the sex of a minor on a birth certificate except in such cases where an error had been made or “if the minor at birth had atypical or ambiguous sex organs,” according to the Hobby School survey.
Once again, Democrats were the only political subset not to favor legislation to do so, with 45% supporting the proposal. In contrast, 79% of Republicans agreed with the ban, alongside 75% of independents.
An even higher percentage of respondents (69%) expressed support for laws requiring schools to receive consent from parents before students could receive “sexuality instruction.” A majority of Democrats (55%) backed this regulation, alongside 82% of Republicans and 78% of independents.
Andrew Brown, the associate vice president of policy at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, suggested to The Dallas Express, “I think what the University of Houston poll shows is that the vast majority of the public, their just gut reaction when they learn about the experimental medical procedures that are being performed on children, is to reject that experimentation.”
He added, “They basically know intuitively what the emerging scientific research is showing us, which is, there is no conclusive evidence at all that puberty blocker, cross-sex hormones, and surgical interventions actually help children who are struggling with gender dysphoria.”
Brown did offer a note of caution, however, about labeling it specifically as “abuse” because of the risks of “separating a child from their family and pulling them into the state run foster care system.”
He continued, “I think really that polling demonstrates that the vocal minority of folks who are pushing this radical agenda really is a very, very small but very, very loud minority in the state of Texas and across the country.”
However, proponents of “gender-affirming care” for minors, such as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), claim that prohibitions against such programs prevent “life-saving” care.
HHS claims that the practice “improves the mental health and overall well-being of gender diverse children and adolescents” and “has been shown to increase positive outcomes for transgender and nonbinary children and adolescents.”
Recently, a transgender youth clinic in Dallas was allowed to begin accepting minors again after the chief medical director sued against its prior closure on the grounds that it was “discriminatory against patients based upon their gender identity.”
The Dallas Express reached out to the Transgender Education Network of Texas and Equality Texas for a response to the survey’s findings but did not receive one from either organization prior to publication.