Support once afforded LGBTQ+ foster kids has vanished and a culture of silence has blanketed the agency tasked with raising children growing up in the system.
Isabella Morningstar talks with Marcus Anthony, a case manager at Thrive Youth Center in San Antonio as he looks for an update on her new birth certificate. After she aged out of the foster care system in 2020, she had a difficult time updating her paperwork to reflect her legal name and gender marker.
Yet Texas’ Child Protective Services doesn’t track the sexual orientation or gender identity of youth in foster care. And as state leaders prioritized legislating everything from transgender kids’ access to certain health care and the places drag queens can perform, they also quietly stalled efforts to better train adults charged with caring for trans foster youth.
Trans Texans, though, say those attempts further marginalize an already vulnerable part of the population. And for trans people who age out of the foster care system, that kind of stigma worsens an already tenuous struggle to build an adult life without the kind of familial, financial and social support upon which most young adults depend.
“You cannot come to a person who has this part of their identity that has substantially impacted their life and tell them, ‘Well we’re not going to talk about that,’” Mehrhof said. “You’re asking them to either hide or deny part of who they are.”Isabella Morningstar was 14 when her adoptive mother of nearly a decade refused to let the teenager continue living with her — a decision that kick-started a cycle of displacement.
Over the next four years, the vitriol from adults who were supposed to provide a safe and stable home conditioned Morningstar to expect people around her would put in little effort to understand her. Last week, a federal judge fined the Health and Human Services Commission, which oversees DFPS, $100,000 per day in fines for neglecting investigations into allegations of abuse of children in foster care.
Asher’s dad refused to come to terms with the fact that he had a trans son. Their relationship fell apart, and Asher’s mental health deteriorated with it. That same year, DFPS quietly altered their Foster Care Bill of Rights, a document outlining how children should be treated in the state’s care. The agency, whose top official is appointed by the governor, removed mentions of protections specific to gender identity and sexual orientation.
That wasn’t the case at Lifeworks, the residential center in Austin where Asher was taken around Thanksgiving in 2020. When another foster kid bullied Asher for being trans, the staff immediately addressed the incident. He was also connected with a clinic where he could begin the process of medically transitioning through the use of hormone treatment.
For Asher, a transgender teenager already in the state’s care, the legislative debates were perplexing. Two months before his 18th birthday, while still in state care, he began taking testosterone.issued an opinion that transition-related surgery, and nonsurgical treatments such as puberty blockers and hormone therapy, should be considered child abuse.LGBTQ+ lawmakers requested to meet with then-DFPS Commissioner Jaime Masters over Abbott’s directive.
Morningstar walks to Palo Alto College. While she was in the state’s care, Texas removed the few affirmations and protections offered foster youth based on their sexual orientation and gender identity. Years later, DFPS removed a page on the agency’s website that listed resources for LGBTQ+ youth in care, including a suicide hotline.After Morningstar aged out of foster care in 2020, she struggled to find a stable place to live.
About half of the youth that Thrive serves are former foster youth, Jenny Hixon, who ended her tenure as the nonprofit’s executive director last week, told the Tribune. She said many of the trans residents are skeptical of mental health services provided by the nonprofit because the therapists they were forced to see while they were wards of the state didn’t affirm their gender identities.
“We’re starting from the ground up with some of these kids, they don’t know how to use a can opener,” Hixon said. “Basic things that you would think most 18-year-olds would know, and they don’t know.”As Republican lawmakers were wading into transgender politics roughly seven years ago, there was momentum among advocates who worked with foster youth to improve outcomes from LGBTQ+ adolescents in the state’s care.
“You may have a home that is in flat tire Texas and doesn't necessarily have a lot of experience working with a queer kid, and all of a sudden, they have a queer kid and want to be that supportive placement for them,” said Francis, the regional National Association of Social Workers leader who helped prepare the LGBTQ+ Child Welfare Resource Guide. “We wrote that because DFPS was doing nothing.
“We prioritize the inclusivity of all the youth under our care, including those who identify as LGBTQ+,” Denny Marlin, the executive director of marketing and communications for Saint Francis Ministries, said in a statement.
Texas Politics Texas Policy Texas Government Demographics Politics State Government Child Protective Services Department Of Family And Protective Services Greg Abbott Ken Paxton LGBTQ 88Th Legislative Session
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