Texas governor responds to LGBTQ human rights criticisms: ‘The UN can go pound sand’

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) over the weekend brushed off recent criticism of new state laws that target LGBTQ individuals, as well as claims that such measures violate federal and international human rights law.

Responding to a letter sent last month to the United Nations accusing the governor and other state officials of infringing on the rights of LGBTQ Texans through administrative and legislative actions, Abbott told the international nonprofit to stay out of it.

“The UN can go pound sand,” Abbott said Sunday on X, formerly Twitter.

Abbott similarly told the organization to “pound sand” in 2021, after U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said Texas will need to become less dependent on oil and gas to remain prosperous into 2050.

In January, four LGBTQ rights groups in a joint letter of allegation to more than a dozen independent experts, working groups and special rapporteurs at the U.N. said Texas leaders had intentionally targeted the LGBTQ community during the state’s last legislative session.

Texas lawmakers in 2023 filed at least 55 bills targeting LGBTQ individuals, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), accounting for roughly 10 percent of anti-LGBTQ legislation filed nationwide last year.

The groups’ appeal to the U.N. focuses on seven bills Abbott signed into law in 2023, including measures that ban gender-affirming health care for minors and heavily restrict transgender athletes’ participation in school sports.

“Taken individually, the seven pieces of legislation discussed in this submission will disrupt the lives of LGBTQIA+ people of various ages and backgrounds. Put together, the Bills are a systemic attack on the fundamental rights, dignities, and identities of LGBTQIA+ persons that opens the gates for discrimination by both public and private actors,” Equality Texas, GLAAD, the Human Rights Campaign and the ACLU of Texas wrote in the letter.

The letter also criticizes Texas officials’ actions leading up to last year’s legislative session, including state Attorney General Ken Paxton’s (R) 2022 opinion equating gender-affirming medical care with child abuse and a subsequent order from Abbott directing state agencies to investigate the parents of transgender minors for child abuse.

The letter, which was also signed by The University of Texas at Austin School of Law’s Human Rights Clinic, asks the U.N. to call for the bills to be repealed and encourage both the state and federal governments to pass stronger nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ individuals. 

It also criticizes the Biden administration’s response to anti-LGBTQ laws enacted in Texas and elsewhere, accusing the federal government of violating a decades-old U.N. treaty by failing to hold states accountable.

The U.N. has previously expressed some unease over anti-LGBTQ legislation in the U.S., and a committee in December said it was “concerned at the increase in the number of state laws that severely restrict the rights of persons on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity.”