Texas government goes to war against human dignity
By 
Greg Abbott is threatening to abrogate the custodial rights of any parent who provides a trans child with supportive medical care, and to enforce this by deputizing many Texas citizens with public roles into being an anti-trans Stasi:
It is now the official policy of Texas that adults are required to assess the genitals of every child they interact with and to report what they observe to the government so it can send agents out to forcibly inspect children's genitals and remove the children from their homes. https://t.co/8zcH4azjzM— Max Kennerly (@MaxKennerly) February 23, 2022
Serwer saw this coming last year, and his analysis remains spot-on.
I also strongly agree with David Roth that it’s long past time to stop referring to policies diminishing the rights of groups of people as “culture war wedge issues”:
It's infuriating to see explicit calls for state violence like this get filed under "culture war wedge issue." At some point you have to take seriously that the people pushing this stuff really do want to punish and hurt trans people and their families. https://t.co/uwIMkHdVZn— David Roth (@david_j_roth) February 23, 2022
One effect of politics-first descriptions of policies like this, however unintentional, is to play into the very, very wrong narrative the Republican elites Aren’t Really Serious about “culture war” policies. Well, abortions are down 60% in Texas since the Supreme Court encouragingly winked at the state’s nullification of Roe v. Wade. They’re serious, deadly so, and the impact is material as hell.