Texas DFPS Gender Care Investigations: Court Timeline

A Texas appeals court in 2022 upheld orders blocking state child welfare investigations of parents whose transgender children received medical treatment. The Texas Supreme Court later narrowed that protection to the families who sued, and in April 2026 it lifted the remaining injunctions as moot after the investigations closed. It never ruled on whether the investigations were lawful.

Key takeaways

  • The dispute began with a February 2022 attorney general opinion and a governor's letter directing the Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) to investigate.
  • On May 13, 2022, the Texas Supreme Court held the appeals court order went too far by covering nonparties.
  • Texas Senate Bill 14, banning these treatments for minors, took effect in 2023 and was upheld by the Texas Supreme Court in 2024.
  • On April 24, 2026, the Texas Supreme Court lifted the remaining injunctions without deciding the underlying legal question.

What happened in the Texas courts?

In February 2022, the Texas attorney general issued a nonbinding opinion stating that certain treatments for gender dysphoria in minors could be considered child abuse under state law. The next day, the governor sent a letter directing DFPS to investigate reported cases. Families and a licensed psychologist sued in Travis County district court, which temporarily blocked the investigations. The Third Court of Appeals in Austin upheld that block and applied it broadly.

The state appealed to the Texas Supreme Court. On May 13, 2022, the court ruled that the appeals court had overstepped by extending protection to "any and all" nonparties, so investigations of families outside the lawsuit could continue. The court also said DFPS was not compelled by law to follow the governor's letter or the attorney general's opinion, according to reporting by Texas Standard.

In June 2022, a separate suit was filed on behalf of the advocacy group PFLAG and member families. The Travis County court issued temporary injunctions in 2022 blocking DFPS from investigating PFLAG members on this basis alone, and those injunctions remained in place for several years.

What is the current status in 2026?

DateEvent
February 2022Attorney general opinion; governor directs DFPS to investigate
March 2022Lawsuit filed; district court temporarily blocks investigations
Spring 2022Third Court of Appeals upholds the block and applies it broadly
May 13, 2022Texas Supreme Court limits protection to the plaintiffs
2022Temporary injunctions protect PFLAG members
2023Senate Bill 14 takes effect, prohibiting these treatments for minors in Texas
June 2024Texas Supreme Court upholds SB 14
June 18, 2025U.S. Supreme Court upholds a similar Tennessee law in United States v. Skrmetti
April 24, 2026Texas Supreme Court lifts the remaining injunctions

The Texas Tribune reported that the April 2026 ruling rested on the fact that DFPS had closed its investigations of the plaintiff families, and that one child had turned 18. The court found no credible, nonspeculative threat of future investigations of these plaintiffs. It did not decide whether providing these treatments to minors is child abuse under Texas law.

At the federal level, SCOTUSblog summarizes the Skrmetti decision as a 6-3 ruling that Tennessee's law does not trigger heightened scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause and survives rational basis review. That decision shapes how courts evaluate similar state laws.

What does this mean for employers?

These cases concern state child welfare authority and medical regulation, not employment law directly. Still, employers with staff in Texas or in states with similar laws may see questions from employees, and HR teams should respond consistently and within existing law and policy.

  • Health plan design. Coverage questions depend on plan type. Fully insured plans are generally subject to state insurance regulation, while self-funded ERISA plans follow different rules. Review plan documents with benefits counsel; our open enrollment benefits admin checklist is a good point to schedule that review.
  • Leave. Employees may request time off for a family member's care or for legal matters. Apply existing leave policies and FMLA rules evenly; see our explainer on FMLA protections during medical leave.
  • Relocation and remote work requests. Some employees may ask to move or work from another state. Evaluate these under your normal remote work policy and consider tax and payroll impacts, covered in our guide to multi-state payroll with conflicting tax rules.
  • Confidentiality. Treat any family medical information employees share as confidential and limit it to those who need it.
  • Manager guidance. Ask managers to route questions to HR rather than offer legal or personal opinions.

Frequently Asked Questions

Did the Texas Supreme Court rule that the treatments are child abuse?

No. In April 2026, the court lifted the injunctions because the investigations of the plaintiff families had closed and there was no credible threat of new ones. It did not decide whether providing these treatments to minors constitutes child abuse. In 2022, the court said the attorney general's opinion and the governor's letter did not legally bind DFPS.

Are these treatments for minors legal in Texas now?

Texas Senate Bill 14, which took effect in 2023, prohibits certain medical treatments for gender transition in minors, and the Texas Supreme Court upheld the law in 2024. In 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a similar Tennessee law. Employers and families with specific questions should consult qualified legal counsel for current rules.

Should employers change policies because of these rulings?

The rulings do not directly change employment obligations. Employers should confirm that benefits plans, leave policies and confidentiality practices are applied consistently and comply with federal and state law. Benefits counsel can explain how state laws affect fully insured versus self-funded plans. Clear manager guidance helps avoid inconsistent responses.

Next steps

Ask benefits counsel to confirm how current state and federal law applies to your plans, brief HR business partners on the timeline so answers are consistent, and remind managers to route employee questions to HR. Revisit the topic if new legislation or court decisions follow.

Last reviewed: October 2026.

Sources

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular Posts

Why Workday Onboarding Breaks Down for Frontline Employees

Image
The Onboarding Gap Nobody Talks About Workday's onboarding module is well-designed for its intended audience: office-based, desk workers with reliable computer access, personal email addresses, and the digital literacy to navigate a web-based portal. For this population, Workday onboarding works well, it automates tasks, routes approvals, collects documents, and creates a reasonably smooth first-week experience. But most organizations using Workday have a substantial population of frontline workers: warehouse employees, retail staff, manufacturing workers, healthcare aides, food service workers, drivers. For this population, the standard Workday onboarding experience frequently fails in ways that are predictable, documented, and, crucially, fixable. Understanding why it breaks down and what actually works is increasingly urgent as labor market competition for frontline talent intensifies. How Standard Workday Onboarding Is Designed Workday's new hire onboarding (delivered throu...
Read more

How to Improve the Customer Experience (CX)

Customer experience is the sum of every interaction a customer has with your company, from the first ad they see to the way a return gets handled years after the purchase. Companies that take this seriously outperform those that treat CX as a support function. The ones that struggle tend to confuse customer satisfaction scores with actual improvements, or fix the wrong things. Here's a practical look at what actually moves CX forward. Start with where customers actually struggle Most CX improvement programs begin with surveys. Surveys are useful but limited, they capture what customers are willing to articulate after the fact, which tends to under-report friction in the middle of an experience and over-index on the most recent interaction. The richer data comes from observing behavior directly: where do customers drop off in a purchase flow? Where do support tickets spike? What search queries are people entering on your site that suggest they can't find what they're loo...
Read more

How Do I Log In and Sign In to Workday HCM

Workday HCM is the system your organization uses to manage everything from your pay stubs and benefits to time off requests and performance reviews. Getting in is usually simple once you know where to go, but first-time login, password resets, and single sign-on setups can trip people up if no one has walked them through it. Here's what you need to know. How to find your Workday login URL Workday doesn't have one universal login page. Each organization has its own tenant, a dedicated instance with a unique URL. Your company's HR department or IT team should have provided the URL when you were onboarded. It usually looks something like your-company.workday.com or wd3.myworkday.com/yourcompany . If you weren't given the URL, check your onboarding email, your company's intranet, or ask HR directly. Some organizations also link to Workday from their internal HR portal. Don't try to guess the URL, there's no central directory, and guessing wrong just takes...
Read more

UKG Union Contract and Overtime Rules for Multi-Site Food Plants

Multi-site food manufacturers running UKG often struggle with one thing: each plant has its own union contract, shift pattern and overtime rules, while the timekeeping system is configured centrally. The fix: document every contract rule precisely, map it to UKG pay rules and work rules, test against real timecards, and handle true exceptions with add-ons rather than core customization. Disclosure: The author works at CloudApper, which makes the UKG add-ons discussed in this article. Why are union contracts so hard to configure in UKG? Federal law sets a floor. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, non-exempt employees must receive at least one and a half times their regular rate for hours worked over 40 in a workweek. Collective bargaining agreements frequently go further, and food plants often have several agreements across locations. Common contract provisions include: Daily overtime after 8 hours, or after 10 on a four-day schedule. Double time on the seventh consecutive day o...
Read more

Infor HCM Software Engineer Jobs: Salary Factors and Skills

An Infor HCM software engineer's salary depends mostly on the type of employer, the depth of Infor platform knowledge, and location. Engineers who combine general software skills with hands-on experience in Infor CloudSuite HCM, Lawson, Infor ION integrations and payroll logic tend to command more than generalist developers, because that combination is scarce in the job market. What does an Infor HCM software engineer actually do? The title covers several different jobs, and pay follows the job more than the title. Broadly, these engineers build, configure, integrate and support the Infor human capital management stack, which includes core HR, payroll, benefits, talent management and workforce management. Many organizations still run the older on-premises Infor Lawson system alongside or instead of the cloud suite, so experience with both is common. Typical responsibilities include: Building and maintaining integrations between Infor HCM and payroll providers, benefits carrie...
Read more

The End of Remote Work: Why Companies Want You Back

Return to Office: The Trend Reshaping the Modern Workplace After years of celebrating the remote work revolution, a powerful counter-movement has taken hold. Amazon, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Disney, and hundreds of other organizations have issued return-to-office (RTO) mandates, some requiring full five-day-a-week presence. The era of near-universal remote work flexibility appears to be giving way to something more complicated, and HR leaders are at the center of navigating it. Why Companies Are Calling Employees Back Collaboration and Innovation: Many executives argue that the serendipitous interactions, the hallway conversation, the spontaneous whiteboard session, that drive breakthrough ideas simply cannot be replicated on Zoom. Studies from Stanford and MIT suggest that in-person collaboration produces measurably higher rates of novel idea generation. Culture and Cohesion: Building and sustaining organizational culture at a distance has proven harder than anticipated. N...
Read more

ERP Solution Guide: How to Choose the Best ERP for You

What Is an ERP System and Why Does It Matter? An enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is software that integrates the core functions of a business — finance, inventory, procurement, human resources, manufacturing, and customer management — into a single, connected platform. Instead of data living in separate spreadsheets or standalone applications that don't talk to each other, an ERP creates one source of truth for the entire organization. For growing companies, the question is usually not whether they need an ERP but when and which one. Getting this decision right has long-term consequences. A poorly chosen ERP creates more problems than it solves — forcing teams to work around the system, creating data integrity issues, and consuming IT resources in an endless cycle of customization and maintenance. A well-chosen ERP, on the other hand, becomes the operational backbone that lets a company scale without proportionally growing its administrative overhead. Understandin...
Read more

How to Search in Workday: Find Reqs, Reports, People and Tasks

To search in Workday, type into the global search bar at the top of any page, press Enter, then use the category filters on the left of the results to narrow to people, organizations, tasks and reports or other object types. Workday only returns items your security roles allow you to see, so missing results often mean an access issue rather than a typo. How does Workday search work? Workday uses a single global search box rather than separate menus for each module. Everything in the tenant, from a worker's profile to a job requisition to a custom report, is an object that search can find if you have permission to view it. Three points explain most search behavior: Security trimming. Results are filtered by your security groups. A recruiter and a payroll partner typing the same term will see different results. Categories. After you press Enter, results are grouped into categories that appear as filters. Clicking one hides everything else. Related actions. Once you open an...
Read more

New Apple Watch Health Features Will Be Available This Year, but Blood Pressure and Blood Sugar Sensors Will Not Be Available Until Next Year

Image
What Apple confirmed for its upcoming watch lineup Apple's annual health feature announcements for its Watch lineup continue to generate significant attention, both from health enthusiasts who track every new sensor addition and from the clinical research community that increasingly uses consumer wearables in studies. The pattern that has emerged over the past several product cycles is consistent: Apple confirms a set of features that will ship with the current year's model and acknowledges separately that other, more complex sensors are still in development and will not arrive on schedule. This year's announcement followed that pattern closely. Several new health monitoring capabilities are confirmed for the current Apple Watch generation, representing meaningful additions to what the device can track passively. At the same time, the two most anticipated sensor additions, continuous blood pressure monitoring and non-invasive blood glucose measurement, will not be availa...
Read more

Dollar General Store Walkout: Lessons for Retail HR

In March 2024, every employee at a Dollar General store in Mineral Point, Wisconsin, quit at once and posted "We quit" signs on the doors. They cited a lack of appreciation, being overworked and underpaid, and a dispute over a corporate rule limiting which unsold items could be donated. The store reopened about three hours later. Key takeaways The walkout was triggered by a policy change, but the notes employees left pointed to long-running frustration with workload, pay and recognition. Policies that clash with frontline values (such as throwing away usable goods) can become flashpoints when trust is already low. Explaining the reason behind a rule, and giving local teams a channel to push back, costs little compared with a full-store walkout. Retail and hourly employers should treat a mass resignation as a lagging indicator and track earlier warning signs. What happened at the Mineral Point store? According to reporting syndicated by Sinclair stations, customers ...
Read more