Transgender students in Texas would be barred from school sports teams matching their gender identity under a bill advanced by state Senate

The Texas Tribune | By Shawn Mulcahy

The proposal would prohibit students from participating in a sport “that is designated for the biological sex opposite to the student’s biological sex as determined at the student’s birth.”

Sign up for The Brief, our daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.

Transgender students would be banned from competing on school sports teams based on their gender identity under a bill that passed the Texas Senate on Thursday.

Despite immense opposition from civil rights groups and Democrats, the upper chamber voted on an 18-12 vote to advance Senate Bill 29. The measure now heads to the Texas House.

The proposal would prohibit students from participating in a sport “that is designated for the biological sex opposite to the student’s biological sex as determined at the student’s birth.” Students would be required to prove their “biological sex” by showing their original, unamended birth certificates.

State Sen. Charles Perry, R-Lubbock, argued on Wednesday that the prohibition is necessary to keep girls safe from injury and to retain fairness in interscholastic athletics. But Perry acknowledged that he doesn’t know of any transgender students currently competing in Texas school sports.

And medical professionals have largely debunked the argument that transgender athletes have an advantage, with one study showing people taking hormones did not have a significant performance edge in distance running.

Opponents said the Republican leadership-backed bill was a “fear tactic” in search of a problem that doesn’t exist.

“Trans kids, they just know they are not what their birth certificate says,” said state Sen. José Menéndez, D-San Antonio. “And that’s where we’re creating a problem that we don’t need to.”

The measure would codify existing school athletic policy. The University Interscholastic League of Texas, which governs high school athletics and extracurricular activities, currently relies on students’ birth certificates to determine whether they participate in men’s or women’s athletics. Notably, the UIL recognizes changes made to birth certificates to alter a student’s gender marker, though that would no longer be allowed under the proposal.

Both the NCAA, the governing body for college athletics, and the International Olympic Committee allow athletes to compete based on their gender identity.

State Sen. Nathan Johnson, D-Dallas, suggested that if lawmakers were truly concerned with player safety, they’d focus on legislating injury-prone contact sports such as football. He also worried that the proposal could be harmful to cisgender or nonbinary students whose gender expressions don’t align with traditional social constructs. And he questioned whether his colleagues were trying to legislate a situation that isn't widespread.

“I think we spend a lot of time anticipating things that aren’t going to happen,” Johnson said. “If this becomes a real problem, there might be a more subtle way we can handle it.”

Wednesday afternoon, Equality Texas held a news conference outside the Capitol building in Austin to bring awareness to over 30 bills filed in the legislature that would discriminate against LGBTQ youth. Ricardo Martinez, the organization’s CEO, noted that the first of these anti-trans bills was filed 156 days ago, on the first day of bill filing for this session.

“That day kicked off the Texas portion of a nationally-coordinated attack on our community,” Martinez said. “This attack, which intentionally targets transgender and intersex youth, who are some of the most vulnerable members of our community, is especially cruel given that we’re still in a deadly pandemic.”

Landon Richie, an 18-year-old transgender Texan, skipped his classes at the University of Houston to speak outside the Capitol Wednesday.

“Trans kids belong in Texas and deserve the same rights, access to health care, access to sports, access to public facilities, as any other Texan,” Richie said.

Mack Beggs, a transgender athlete from Texas, garnered national headlines after he won back-to-back wrestling titles in 2017 and 2018. Beggs competed in the women's division because the UIL ruled he had to compete against the gender that appeared on his birth certificate. Attorney Jim Baudhuin sued the UIL in 2017, arguing that Beggs posed an injury risk to other athletes and possessed an unfair advantage. A Travis County judge tossed out the case.

“Mentally, it took a toll on me,” Beggs told Yahoo News last month. “I think we need to have resources in place for other [trans] kids who are in those positions.”

He spoke out against proposals like SB 29, calling them "revolting and honestly appalling."

The move by the Texas Senate is part of a national push by conservatives to restrict rights for transgender students. Similar bills have been filed in at least 20 states. Three states — Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee — earlier this year signed the prohibition into law.

Idaho was the first state to pass a law seeking to block transgender youth from sports last March. The law has been challenged in federal court and has been blocked by a federal judge as the legal challenge proceeds through the courts.

On Monday, the National Collegiate Athletic Association Board of Governors warned that it will only hold college championships in states where transgender student-athletes can participate without discrimination.

“Inclusion and fairness can coexist for all student-athletes, including transgender athletes, at all levels of sport,” the NCAA statement said. “Our clear expectation as the Association’s top governing body is that all student-athletes will be treated with dignity and respect. We are committed to ensuring that NCAA championships are open for all who earn the right to compete in them.”

Multiple games in the 2022 NCAA men’s March Madness tournament are already scheduled to be played in Fort Worth and San Antonio and the 2024 college football national championship is slated for NRG Stadium in Houston.

Disclosure: Equality Texas and University of Houston have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

State Sen. Nathan Johnson, D-Dallas, suggested that if lawmakers were truly concerned with player safety, they’d focus on legislating injury-prone contact sports such as football...“I think we spend a lot of time anticipating things that aren’t going to happen,” Johnson said. “If this becomes a real problem, there might be a more subtle way we can handle it.”

Opinion: Why Texas must change its policy on runaway youth

By Byron Sanders, Austin American-Statesman

According to a report by The National Runaway Switchboard, more than 1.5 million youth experience a runaway episode each year. In Texas, that decision can have a long and lasting impact on youths’ lives, in large part because of how the state treats the act of running away.

What many Texans may not know is that it is against the law for a child to run away from home in our state. Texas is one of less than 10 states in the country where this is still the case.

Running away is classified in Texas as a ‘status offense’ - an act that is a violation of law only because of a youth’s status as a minor. Running away from home risks a potentially detrimental contact with the justice system including detention in juvenile facilities.

In addition, if a status offender violates a court order related to the status offense — running away again, for example — a court can punish the youth with a term of secure confinement. These instances of secure confinement do nothing to help youth and can, in fact, make it more likely that youth continue to engage in delinquent behavior.

Rather than address root issues, Texas’ current recourse for runaway youth leads to further isolation. The factors that may lead youth to run away from home are often outside of their control — they may be leaving behind an unsafe or abusive environment, difficulties at school or dealing with unmet mental health needs. According to the National Runaway Safeline, “58% of youth who reached out to NRS indicated family dynamics as a reason for seeking crisis intervention.”

We must change the way that Texas considers runaway youth and create policy that would provide the help and resources they need and deserve. One way forward is through a recent bill introduced by State Sen. Nathan Johnson (D-Dallas).

SB 404 (HB 1709) would decriminalize running away as a status offense and prohibit juvenile detention for youth who have run away. Instead, the bill would help redirect youth to emergency shelters and crisis intervention services through the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services . SB 404 also prevents status offenders of the remaining offenses from being held in a secure facility, either pre- or post-adjudication. Instead of secure facilities, youth could be detained in juvenile process offices and places of non-secure custody for up to 6 hours, or in non-secure correction facilities for up to 24 hours. Finally, Sen. Johnson’s bill eliminates the use of a violation of a court order to sentence status offenders to post-adjudication secure confinement.

At Big Thought, we know that we must address the root causes of an issue, not simply respond to its consequences. Big Thought’s work with juvenile justice intervention and Creative Solutions, our nationally recognized arts-as-workforce intervention program for adjudicated youth, has shown us that punitive measures are not the way forward. And by continuing to consider running away as a status offense, we prohibit youth from tapping into their inherent greatness.

All youth are born with greatness and we have the responsibility to create the conditions for that greatness to shine. Reimagining how we treat those who've run away from home explicitly empowers the lives of youth who've been most marginalized. That's the kind of future they deserve.

Passing SB 404 is a step toward this future. If you’d like to support SB 404, reach out to your state representatives.

Sanders is the CEO of Big Thought, an education-focused nonprofit based in Dallas.

Texas Adoptees Are Fighting for the Right to Access Their Own Birth Certificates

Fed up with DNA tests and expensive investigators, some adult adoptees are asking the state to unseal their original birth records.

By Kristin Finan, Texas Monthly

Shawna Hodgson was adopted as an infant in the seventies and, she says, “raised in a great family” in Houston. But despite her happy childhood, she always had an underlying need to know more about her birth family. When Hodgson became an adult, she decided to request a copy of her original birth certificate, something she had always assumed she was entitled to receive, from the Texas Department of State Health Services’ vital statistics office. Her request was immediately denied.

“I didn’t know that my original birth certificate was sealed. I just kind of assumed they would hand that information over to me when I was [of age],” says Hodgson. “So imagine my surprise when I marched in there like, ‘I’m ready for my file,’ and they were like, ‘No, no, no. You don’t have the right to that.’” 

Birth certificates are a hot-button issue for Texas-born adoptees, some of whom have spent decades trying to change a state law that makes getting the records a Kafkaesque challenge. Many adult adoptees say that by restricting the ability to obtain their own records, the state denies them the opportunity to access potentially life-saving information about their medical and family histories. 

Under current Texas law, a child’s original birth certificate is sealed when he or she is adopted and the adoptive parents are sent a supplementary birth certificate that lists them as the child’s parents. Adoptees who do not know their birth parents’ names must petition for access in court in the county that granted the adoption and must show what the law calls, without defining the term, “good cause.” 

Hodgson, who did not know her birth parents’ names, went to court twice, and both times she was denied. A judge in Harris County even told her she needed her adoptive parents’ permission, despite the fact that she was 38 years old. She ultimately spent five years conducting her own search, during which she says she spent more than $15,000 on everything from DNA testing to private investigators. After all the arduous effort, Hodgson says, “When I met my birth family, it was like a photo that was blurry came into view.” The search fired her up so much that she became an advocate for other adoptees, and is now a spokeswoman for the Texas Adoptee Rights Coalition. (I met Hodgson during my search for original birth certificates for my two adopted children.)

Adoptees have long said these restrictions violate their civil and human rights. But as a result of increasing awareness of the topic, recent laws granting unrestricted birth certificate access in nine other states including New York and Colorado, and a newly introduced bill in the Texas Legislature that’s more streamlined than bills in previous sessions and has bipartisan support, many advocates are hopeful that this will be the session when things change. 

The new bill was introduced in the Senate by Democrat Nathan Johnson, and in the House by Representative Cody Harris, a Republican who represents an East Texas district that includes Palestine and Corsicana and who is an adoptive dad himself. 

Harris said his experience of adopting his daughter Chloe, now seven, out of foster care and “just seeing how guarded and limited the information is from an adoptive parent’s perspective” greatly informed his decision to sponsor the bill.

“I believe everyone should be able to know where they came from and gain access to that information. It covers everything from knowing your own family medical history about things you might be predisposed towards to diseases that you could take a preventative approach to if you only had the information,” Harris says.

If passed, the bill would allow any adult adoptee to receive a copy of his or her original birth certificate without a court order as long as the adoptee was born in Texas, was previously issued a supplementary certificate, and is now eighteen years old. Unlike previous versions, this simpler bill does not include the option for birth parents to fill out a form saying whether they’d like to be contacted by the adopted person or provide him or her with family medical history.

Because of the size of Texas’s population, changing the law here could affect 800,000 Texas-born adoptees, says Tim Monti-Wohlpart, an advocate who worked on the similar New York bill that passed in 2019. “A lot of eyes are on Texas right now,” he says, adding that, if passed, the Texas bill could help inspire similar legislation in other states.

While thirty years of advocacy within the Texas Legislature have left lawmakers well-informed on the topic, advocates’ inability to get the law changed up to this point can be attributed in large part to the decades-old culture of secrecy surrounding adoption. Whether it was promises made by adoption agencies to unmarried birth mothers who wanted privacy or politicians seeking to protect adoptive parents from intrusion from birth families, adoptees argue that the laws have rarely been about them or their own needs. 

The Gladney Center for Adoption, a national agency based in Texas that has completed 36,000 adoptions since 1887—the majority of which took place in Texas—is among the organizations now voicing support for adult adoptee access. Mark Melson, CEO, president, and Gladney parent, said via email that one of the main requests that the Gladney Center for Adoption’s post-adoption team receives is access to birth records by adopted adults. 

But not everyone agrees that all adult adoptees should be able to access their original birth certificates, including Texas senator Donna Campbell, an adoptive mother herself. Campbell said that because 90 percent of adoptions that occur today are open, respect should be paid to the birth mothers who choose closed adoption. 

“It is rare for a woman to choose a closed adoption—meaning she desires no contact with the child. … She does not do this lightly or without justification,” Campbell said via email. “I am an adoptive mom who understands the unintentional consequences of this bill. We are in no position of trying to undo her decision. This is not the proper role of government.”

Instead, Campbell offers up the state’s Central Adoption Registry, in which adoptees, birth parents, and biological siblings of adult adoptees can register themselves in hopes of locating family members without going through the court system. The mutual-consent adoption registry, she says, “allows both consenting parties to come together on their own accord.”

Adoptees in search of biological family members can also turn to DNA tests like 23andMe and AncestryDNA—a process that advocates say can become emotionally loaded. “As greater access to DNA records exists today, we are seeing more ‘accidental’ reunions by family members who are not ready or prepared to meet,” Melson said, adding that Gladney believes it’s preferable for adult adoptees to gain information through birth records rather than through a genetic relative. For many adoptees, learning about family history from a birth certificate allows them greater control over how to use that information, and can be less stressful than sourcing information from unsuspecting members of their birth family. After all, sliding into the Facebook messages of a potential second cousin who may or may not be able to connect you with your birth parents is quite different from learning their names directly from an official state document.

Getting the bill passed this session will come with challenges, as the Legislature is also tackling major issues like the state budget and redistricting, as well as the ongoing impact of COVID-19 and the state’s electricity grid failures during the recent winter storm. Still, thanks to the new bill’s bipartisan support as well as the force of well-known Texas agencies like Gladney, advocates are cautiously optimistic. 

“It’s way past time for people to understand this issue,” Hodgson says. “Can I predict what’s going to happen? No. But I feel optimistic. I have to, because that’s how we keep going.”

This article originally appeared in Texas Monthly at https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/adult-adoptee-birth-cerficiate-legislation/.