The most basic right is to declare who you are. The next is to freely speak your mind. A third is to access healthcare that recognizes your unique needs.
The State of Texas tampered with the first two of these rights with Governor Abbott's directive and House Bill 229. Texas took away healthcare for young patients with gender dysphoria, a legitimate medical diagnosis. It did so in 2023 and the Texas Supreme Court upheld the ban.
The Texas Tribune described House Bill 229:
The Texas Legislature passed a bill that strictly defines man and woman based on reproductive organs. The bill has no civil or criminal penalties attached, but instead will take these new definitions and apply them across state records.
The Governor's directive instructs all state agencies to ensure that agency rules, internal policies, employment practices and other actions “comply with the law and the biological reality that there are only two sexes — male and female.”
The directive quotes President Trump's executive order on the topic, which states:
"These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”
Political leaders imposed a structure that does not exist in reality, as some people are born with both male and female genitalia. Others have a range of conditions that do not conform to the strict Male/Female divide.
approximately 1.7% of people who are intersex or born with chromosomal and physical differences to their reproductive organs
They've always been around. Who do you think were the "She-males" in the carnival freak show? Some Native American tribes called such persons "people with special insight."
HB 229 applies to 98.3% of the population but is wholly inadequate for the 1.7%. That should be legislative malpractice.
What if the law required people with no skin pigmentation to declare themselves the color of their parents and forbid state agencies and those with state funding from saying the word "albino"?
That's essentially what Texas is doing to the 1.7% who are told they must become the 98.3% in name/record only. The state is saying, you do not exist.
What happens to the 98.3% who cannot acknowledge the 1.7%, as is the case in Texas Tech University's various campuses, beginning with Angelo State University.
Angelo State University announced a total ban on any speech by faculty or employees relative to gender identity. This is problematic as actual students (paying customers) are in the banned category. Faculty, staff and advisors deal with the 1.7% on a daily basis. Students studying clinical health professions need to address the whole person in front of them in any practicum situation. That includes nursing students learning the skill of Foley catheter insertion.
ASU instructed faculty that they could not address a student's concern about any issue related to gender identity and could only state the Governor's official position. Should a student in the non-existent category have a grievance relative to the unwritten ban, faculty members would need to escalate that up the chain, where the next level would state the Governor's position and then to the next level where once again the student would hear the Governor's position, never able to have their concern heard much less acknowledged.
So how did a law "focused on records" with no civil or criminal penalties flip the treatment of some college students into a bizarre, inhumane construct? Ask one Texas legislator from Midlothian.
Four people, including top leaders, at Texas A&M lost their positions after this legislator posted a video on X showing a student objecting to an English lesson which included gender identity.
HB 229 went into effect on September 1, 2025. The offending English lesson occurred the third week of Texas A&M's summer session, i.e. before that law went into effect.
Not only did the Texas legislature pass a bad bill, one of their own used social media to instigate a political firestorm. He chose the inflammatory route vs. reasonably addressing a situation in which no state law was in effect.
I moved to Texas in the 80's oil bust. The state was welcoming and I appreciated the freedom that seemed unique. I learned Texas history as I lived near the early Stephen F. Austin communities and its first capital, Washington on the Brazos. In my years here I've grown to appreciate the heat, both humid and dry, and the people who help each other survive in what can be a most inhospitable climate.
State politics have grown more inhospitable than an 118 degree day in West Texas or the bitter cold "pioneer with texting" conditions of Snowmaggedon in February 2021.
The good Lord gave us a break from brutal summer heat the last few months. I pray God gives us a respite from the ill treatment of our brothers, sisters and others in humanity, the kind that wearies my heart and soul.
Leadership deals with what is. "Kind and gentle" discussion includes acknowledging with whom you are having a discussion and treating their concerns with respect.
Politics is an insufficient way to explain our world, given its ever shifting sands, serial mistruths and mind numbing double standards.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered a rainbow painted crosswalk be removed or the City of Houston could lose state funding.
“Today, I directed the Texas Department of Transportation to ensure Texas counties and cities remove any and all political ideologies from our streets. To keep Texans moving safely and free from distraction, we must maintain a safe and consistent transportation network across Texas. Any city that refuses to comply with the federal road standards will face consequences including the withholding or denial of state and federal road funding and suspension of agreements with TxDOT,” said Governor Greg Abbott.
This follows Angelo State University and parent Texas Tech's forbidding discussion of "gender ideologies" by faculty on their campuses. Abbott banned that with his state directive which also mentioned "radical sexual orientation."
In promoting the Governor's directive his office's press release begins with:
Governor Greg Abbott today sent a letter to Texas state agency heads directing them to follow state and federal law, including President Donald Trump’s executive order, in rejecting radical sexual orientation and gender identity ideologies.
Texas universities have tackled Abbot's "gender identify ideologies" but his "radical sexual orientation" charge lingers. I looked up that term and found no definition.
Mouth-taped college professors can sense where this is headed. Those with any "radical sexual orientation" may be resurfaced and painted over.
Gay faculty rightfully have their antennas up as Texas state government morphs into a highly judgmental version worthy of Old Testament religious tribalism. Jesus taught us a far better way.
It's time to raise our view above politics. Where have we been? Where are we now? What do we want to become? As of now, Texas grows more inhospitable every day to the God created range of human existence.
Update 10-31-25: KXAN reported:
Texas judges and justices of the peace, who are legally allowed to perform wedding ceremonies, now will not face punishment if they refuse to perform a ceremony on the basis of a “sincerely held religious belief.”
Judges can refuse to marry people who are of the same sex or interracial couples should that offend their religious beliefs. For the people impacted the end result is a state imposed religious belief.
Judges now can impose unequal protection under the law, just as ASU faculty are being forced to discount the very identity of students in the classes. The Supremes may or may not take up the gay marriage issue.
Update 11-7-25: The Supreme Court ruled that U.S. passports must show the sex declared at birth. Did they add a box for "indeterminate" or "too soon to know" for the 1.7%?
People in same sex marriages have the same concerns as gay ASU professors as to what's next.
Update 11-10-25: Due to Trump's executive order on only two sexes, the Veterans Administration removed male breast cancer as a diagnosis automatically covered for treatment. Male veterans have to prove their breast cancer was caused by their military service.
The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal:
by Kim Davis, the former Kentucky county clerk who now faces hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages and legal fees for refusing to issue marriage licenses after the court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges allowed same-sex couples to marry.
Update 11-15-25: Texas A & M University System upped the ante on prohibited teaching, adding race ideology to gender identity. Austin American Statesmen reported:
(Race Ideology is) “a concept that attempts to shame a particular race or ethnicity, accuse them of being oppressors in a racial hierarchy or conspiracy, ascribe to them less value as contributors to society… assign them intrinsic guilt” or promotes activism “rather than instruction.”
It defines gender ideology as “a concept of self-assessed gender identity replacing, and disconnected from, the biological category of sex.”
The biological actuation of sex should require a more nuanced stance than Texas law demands
Race facts show at the 1787 Constitutional Convention U.S. leaders determined:
every white citizen, including indentured servants, would be counted as whole people, while Black citizens would be counted as three-fifths of a person.
Blacks had less value in determining state populations for legislative apportionment. Slavery was an economic, political and Constitutional hierarchy. Texas was the last bastion for chattel slavery. It's why the state has Juneteenth. Slaves at Galveston, a huge slave trading port, were the last in the United States to know about their freedom.
Update 11-24-25: ABC News reported:
A Texas A&M committee agreed the university was wrong to fire a professor earlier this year after a controversy over a classroom video that showed a student objecting to a children’s literature lesson about gender identity.
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