Last week, a couple of letters from Texas Governor Greg Abbott and his Attorney

General Ken Paxton started pinging around the internet.

Major outrage in Texas today after the state attorney general, Ken Paxton, likened kids getting

gender affirming medical care to child abuse.

These letters were aimed at child protective services, and they encouraged Texans to do

something no other state does.

View medical treatment for trans kids as abusive.

ACLU, Texas, says it's been receiving an uptick and calls from concerned parents of trans youth wanting to know about their legal rights.

Reporter Caitlin Burns, she wasn't surprised by these letters, but she was outraged by them.

You know, I don't understand why anybody wouldn't be upset by that, but I just think back to my own time as a closeted kid who had, you know, I would classify it as gender feelings, but no language to go along with that. All I was was just a scared little kid. And if, you know,

my state governor, who at the time was Mario Cuomo in New York, had come out and done this,

I'm not sure how the little version of me would have handled that. So there's a very visceral reaction to this.

As a reporter, Caitlin knew the facts here. These letters are not binding. In fact, after they got

released, district attorneys representing five of Texas's biggest counties, all said they had no

plans to enforce this directive. First of all, in order for any

child to be removed from a Texas home, there has to be court order, and no court in the United States

has actually determined that affirming a child's gender with health care equates to child abuse.

So they would need to have that precedent before they could actually start removing kids from

homes, but we are seeing institutional pushback against this order.

Because I think a lot of people see this as, you know, what it really is.

It's posturing for a primary campaign that Abbott is facing

against a much more conservative candidate. Oh, yeah. That's the other thing at play here.

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