Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton says James Younger, the seven-year-old boy whose mother says he wants to live as a girl, is facing “irrevocable danger.”

“We are especially concerned that the Department has yet to intervene in this matter where a mother is using alleged medical professionals to fundamentally alter her son’s physiology,” said Jeffrey Mateer, the first assistant Attorney General. He continued:

The children at the center of this dispute are in immediate and irrevocable danger. We ask that you open an investigation this matter as soon as possible and act pursuant to your emergency powers to protect the boy in question [from] permanent and potentially irreversible harm by his mother.

The letter spotlighted the broader childcare problems raised by the claim that children can be converted into members of the opposite sex by medical interventions such as pills, hormones, and surgery. The letter says:

We have been made aware that last year, during an earlier hearing in the case — which was attended by a [state] Department caseworker — the mother admitted multiple times under oath that she intends to transition the boy to a girl. The mother also intends to administer puberty blocking drugs to the child and start that process as early as next year. The social worker that the mother is using to transition the child, who operates Dallas Rainbow Counseling, wrote a letter recommending that the child to be admitted to a “clinic” at Dallas Children’s Hospital that will facilitate the child’s transition. One of the counselors who testified for the mother admitted that there is virtually no peer-reviewed research on the transitioning of a child from one gender to another. But the mother refuses to get any second opinions from other doctors or counselors recommended by the father. The end goal of the mother is to affirm her seven-year-old boy’s gender dysphoria by socially transitioning him to a girl now, and administer puberty blocking drugs in a year so that he subsequently can undergo hormone therapy and explore surgery to physically and permanently alter his body.

An increasing number of children are facing this medical “transition” ordeal. But there are a growing number of reports about the biological and mental harms of the treatment, and an increasing number of adults who “detransition” by rejecting the claim that they can solve their problems by changing their sex.

The AG’s request is likely to be followed, even though a divorce judge gave the father veto power over the mother’s sex change plans after the letter was sent.

Any investigation of the state’s “transgender” industry is likely to face furious opposition from the clinics and drug companies that claim the ability to change people into members of the opposite sex.

Transgender Facts

In general, the transgender ideology says a person’s legal and civic recognition as a man or a woman must be determined by their “gender identity,” not by their biology.

The ideology also insists that men and women are more or less interchangeable, and it objects to the public’s view of the two sexes as simultaneously different, complementary, and equal.

The transgender advocates want to impose their ideology on Americans by establishing “transgender rights” laws, which would require the Department of Justice to penalize individuals and groups who insist that biology determines each person’s male-or-female status — and also shapes peoples’ likely political, civic, and personal priorities.

Polls show the transgender ideology is deeply unpopular, especially among women and parents. In 2017, former President Barack Obama told NPR that his promotion of the transgender ideology made it easier for Donald Trump to win the presidency.

Multiple polls show that most Americans reasonably wish to help and comfort people who think they are a member of the opposite sex, even as they also reject the transgender ideology’s claim that people’s legal sex is determined by their feeling of “gender identity,” not by biology. A U.K. survey shows a similar mix of sympathy for people who say they are transgender alongside lopsided opposition to the ideology.

The transgender movement is diverse, so its different factions have competing goals and priorities. It includes sexual liberationists, progressives, feminists who wish to blur distinctions between the two sexes, and people who glamorize the differences between the two sexes. It includes high-profile children, people who are trying to live as members of the opposite sex, troubled teenage girls trying to flee womanhood, and people trying to “detransition” back to their biological sex.

It also includes men who demand sex from lesbians, masculine autogynephiles who say they are entitled to women’s rights, alpha males who insist they are the natural leaders of women, parents eager to support their children’s’ transgender claims, wealthy donors, politicians, political professionals, revenue-seeking drug companies, surgeons, and medical service providers.

Transgender advocates claim that two million Americans say they are transgender to a greater or lesser extent. But very few people who describe themselves as transgender undergo cosmetic surgery of the genitals. Only about 4,118 Americans surgically altered their bodies in hospitals from 2000 to 2014 to appear like members of the opposite sex, according to a pro-transgender medical study. A Pentagon report commissioned by former Defense Secretary James Mattis said that “rates for genital surgery are exceedingly low- 2% of transgender men and 10% of transgender women.”

The progressive push to bend Americans’ attitudes and their male-and-female civic society around the idea of “gender identity” has already attacked and cracked many popular social rules. Those rules help Americans manage cooperation and competition among and between complementary, different, and equal men and women.

These pro-gender claims have an impact on different-sex bathrooms, shelters for battered women, sports leagues for girls, hiking groups for boys, K-12 curricula, university speech codes, religious freedoms, free speech, the social status of women, parents’ rights in childrearing, children’s safety, practices to help  teenagers,  health outcomes, women’s ideals of beauty, culture and civil society, scientific research, prison safety, civic ceremonies, school rules, men’s sense of masculinity, law enforcement, military culture, and children’s sexual privacy.