Unfair Park from p4 After a round of public interviews, the city hired Bevers, 58, to fill the new role. “For far too long, Dallas City Hall has op- erated under a cloud of suspicion, opacity, and, yes, clear-cut corruption,” Johnson said in a statement. “That begins to change today with the hiring of our city’s first-ever inspector general — the result of a historic ethics reform proposal that won the unani- mous support from the Dallas City Council after I brought it forward late last year.” Bevers is a criminal defense attorney and was the inspector general of the state’s Health and Human Services Com- mission from 2007-2011. He also served as a state deputy inspector general and an as- sistant district attorney for Dallas County. He’ll start his new job on March 14. He’ll be hiring more staff for his office, which will work under city attorney Chris Caso, who reviewed 20 other candidates for the job. Forty people applied, but only half of them were attorneys, which was a re- quirement. During the interview process, Bevers told City Council members, “You won’t find anybody applying for this job that has a pas- sion for this type of work the way I do.” His office will investigate internal fraud, waste, abuse and corruption complaints, as well as anonymous tips, and submit the cred- ible ones to the ethics advisory commission. The way the process has worked, the person making an ethics complaints is largely re- sponsible for investigating their claims and making a case to the ethics advisory commis- sion, which often dismisses the complaints. Now, the inspector general’s office, which has subpoena powers, will be able to vet these complaints and follow up. “This is a really big deal,” City Council member Cara Mendelsohn said in a post on Twitter. “Maybe you have to be an insider to know it, but it could be the most consequen- tial change at City Hall in decades.” The new office has been given up to $197,558 in funding. On top of creating the inspector general’s office, the ethics reforms passed last year also expanded the ethics ad- visory commission to 15 members and in- cludes a chief integrity officer who will help create mandatory ethics training for city employees and officials. “We still have challenges ahead of us, but Dallas is stronger today than it was yester- day,” Johnson said. ▼ POLITICS CHILDISH OBSESSIONS L 6 TEXAS AG KEN PAXTON RECENTLY ISSUED A LEGAL OPINION LABELING GENDER-AFFIRMING TREATMENT FOR TRANS YOUTH CHILD ABUSE. BY MICHAEL MURNEY ast month, U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert spoke for nearly an hour to a packed house at a Donald Trump merchan- dise store in Gainesville, about 70 miles north of Dallas. Predictably, he didn’t take long to start harping on trans youth. The East Texas Republican is one of sev- eral candidates aiming to unseat Texas At- torney General Ken Paxton as the GOP’s nominee for the job during next week’s pri- Gabriel Aponte / Getty Images mary elections. His pitch to supporters at the pop-up warehouse in Gainesville: Pax- ton didn’t go far enough to address the is- sues that matter to the right, issues like widespread election fraud (which no one has ever produced any evidence to support) and the perceived threat of migration on the southern border. He’s part of a small group of hardline Texas conservatives staging a revolt against establishment leaders of the state’s Republi- can Party. Their message: entrenched lead- ers like Abbott and Paxton are RINOs, or Republicans In Name Only. Failure to crimi- nalize what’s known as gender-affirming treatments is one of their favorite lines of at- tack against incumbents like Paxton. Gohmert zeroed in on gender-affirming treatment for transgender youth under the age of 18 about 20 minutes into his speech, calling out Paxton for failing to label such treatments for minors as child abuse under Texas law. Gender-affirmation procedures encom- pass a variety of treatments that help trans people transition to their self-identified gen- der. Many include non-surgical options; al- most all treatments for trans youth are non-surgical, according to Emmett Schelling, executive director of the Trans- gender Education Network of Texas. A vast body of research shows that gender affirma- tion results in significant improvements in trans people’s mental and emotional health. Four months ago, Paxton issued a legal opinion focused on limiting transgender people’s access to gender affirmation treat- ments, but the attorney general did not ex- plicitly state that performing these procedures on transgender children consti- tutes child abuse. This was an outright fail- ure, Gohmert told his supporters. “After four months, he came out with an opinion, and you cannot tell from reading the opinion whether or not he thinks it is child abuse or if he thinks it isn’t,” Gohmert said. “It just dances around, and it doesn’t come to a conclusion. He should’ve come Ken Paxton said youth gender-affirmation treatment could be “child abuse.” forward and spoken truth.” Nine days later, Paxton released another legal opinion, a nonbinding document that does not change existing Texas laws. It states that, according to his reading of Texas laws, gender-affirming treatments “can le- gally constitute child abuse”. Gov. Greg Abbott wasted no time putting “THERE’S NO QUESTION THAT THIS WILL HARM TRANS KIDS AND TRANS PEOPLE.” – TENT EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR EMMETT SCHELLING the opinion into action. Last Tuesday, Abbott sent a letter to Texas’ Department of Family and Pro- tective Services, or DFPS, ordering the agency to investi- gate families of trans youth receiv- ing gender-affirma- tion treatments as child abuse cases. The fallout was immediate. Harris County attorney Christian Menefee denounced the governor’s directive the same day, stating that his office (which di- rects DFPS’s investigations of alleged child abuse), would not be pursuing child abuse investigations based on reports or gender af- firmation treatment. “I’m the county attorney, chief lawyer for the largest county in Texas, and a large part of our office is the CPS group. My position is I have prosecutorial discretion, and we’re not going to rely on some nonsense legal opinion from the AG’s office and start trying to infringe on folks’ parental rights,” Mene- fee told the Observer. Menefee explained that Paxton’s legal opinion is based on “an absurd misreading of the statutes” in Texas law that are “in- tended to capture instances of physical abuse to children,” not address elective medical procedures for transgender youth. Menefee acknowledged that despite his own public stance against the directive and the legal toothlessness of Paxton’s opinion, the governor and AG’s actions pose an im- mediate threat to transgender youth and their families in Texas. “It’s no surprise to me that Congressman Gohmert has recently said this,” Menefee said, referring to Gohmert’s denunciation of Paxton for not labeling gender affirmation treatments as child abuse. “I absolutely be- lieve that part of what we’re seeing is a re- sponse to the races that these folks have going on.” (Both Abbott and Paxton were facing multiple challengers in their March 1 primary races.) “It’s unfortunate that it has been at the detriment of families with trans kids. That’s very much why I spoke out and said we’re not going to be participating in this game,” he continued. “This is a political move and an extreme fear mongering tactic that will have real consequences on the lives of trans youth, their families, and supportive professionals in Texas,” said Shelby Chestnut, director of Policy and Programs at the Transgender Law Center. “Parents and guardians who are right- fully afraid and unsure of what to do should know that loving their children and allowing them to live authentically is not child endan- germent. It is a love, understanding, and trust that youth know what they need,” Chestnut said. Neither Abbott’s nor Paxton’s office re- sponded to the Observer’s request for comment. Researchers have shown that denying gender affirming treatments to trans peo- ple causes increased risk of suicide and a slew of other mental health problems. Em- mett Schelling, executive director of the Transgender Education Network of Texas, said these studies show that Republicans’ political maneuvering in the lead up to the primaries will come at the expense of trans kids’ lives. “They’re OK with seeing those tolls in Texas. There’s no question that this will harm trans kids and trans people,” Schelling said. “The question is how many of us will have to die before we start to reckon with it.” ▼ TEXAS STATE OF SIN Y THIS YEAR, TEXAS WAS RANKED AS THE THIRD MOST SINFUL STATE IN THE COUNTRY. BY SIMONE CARTER ’all better get to praying harder: Texas is the third most sinful state in the country, according to a new survey. To reach that conclusion, the research- ers over at personal finance website Walle- tHub weighed 47 factors of immorality and illicit behavior, including indicators such as theft, excessive drinking and per-capita firearms deaths. Each state was ranked across seven categories: anger and hatred, jealousy, excesses and vices, greed, lust, vanity and laziness. It’s the second year in a row that Texas ranked behind the runner-up reprobate, California, and the big-daddy king of sin, Nevada. Florida and Louisiana came in fourth and fifth, respectively, while Idaho is apparently the morally purest of them >> p8 5 dallasobserver.com | CONTENTS | UNFAIR PARK | SCHUTZE | FEATURE | NIGHT+DAY | CULTURE | MOVIES | DISH | MUSIC | CLASSIFIED | DALLAS OBSERVER MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2014 MARCH 3–9, 2022 DALLAS OBSERVER CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | CULTURE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS dallasobserver.com
