Ken Paxton's office put its name on a lawsuit to strip protections from transgender people. It has ended with a federal judge cutting protections for disabled Americans instead — and Texas, the state the case is named after, was one of the last five states still pushing it.

Stateline reported on October 2 that the case, Texas v. Kennedy, ended last week. The judge removed every mention of "community integration" from the rule that carries out Section 504, the landmark federal law that bars discrimination against people with disabilities.

That language told states to serve disabled people in their own communities — at home, with their families — rather than in nursing homes and state institutions, whenever they could.

How a trans lawsuit became a disability lawsuit

The case started in 2024, when 17 Republican-led states sued the Biden administration for listing gender dysphoria as a protected disability.

After Trump won and said he would not enforce that rule, the original fight was over. Several states dropped out, and their attorneys general rushed to distance themselves amid a backlash from disability groups, who warned the suit put protections for all disabled people at risk.

A handful of states stayed. In January, they amended the lawsuit to ask the court to strike the part of the Section 504 rule that tells states to provide services in the community whenever possible.

By September, five states were left: Alaska, Florida, Louisiana, Montana and Texas. At the end of August, the Trump administration — the defendant — joined them and asked the court to strike the language too. The judge did.

What Paxton's office says, and what it leaves out

Paxton's spokesperson told Stateline the result defeated a "woke" rule that "would have endangered disability funding for the sake of promoting the radical trans agenda," and promised that Texans who rely on Section 504 "are fully protected."

The spokesperson did not address the removal of the integration language.

That matters for real families. Stateline spoke to Charlotte Cravins, a Louisiana attorney whose toddler son has Down syndrome and impaired vision. Publicly funded therapies have helped him learn to crawl, stand and sign while living at home. "This affects children, this affects adults, it affects your elderly parents. It affects everyone," she said. The services her family is now seeking, she said, "are at risk now of being unavailable."

Disability experts told Stateline the legal right to community care still exists under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Supreme Court's 1999 Olmstead decision. But as Alison Barkoff of George Washington University put it, "the right is only as good as the enforcement" — and the federal enforcer just switched sides.

Texas has fought this for years

This isn't a stray outcome. Stateline reports that Texas and Florida have long pushed back on how far the Olmstead ruling reaches. The Justice Department has also dropped out of a long-running case over claims that Texas has been illegally placing thousands of disabled people in nursing homes for decades.

The states' argument in court, per Stateline, was that their budgets are strained and smaller Medicaid budgets leave them making hard choices. Paxton has had far less to say about money squeezed out of Texas health care by Trump — he has stayed silent while $10 billion for Texas hospitals is held back.

The integration language was the part of the Section 504 rule that told states to serve a disabled Texan in the community rather than in an institution whenever possible. Paxton's office used a fight about transgender people as the vehicle, and disabled Texans are the ones who lost ground.

What the record shows

Ken Paxton's Texas was one of five states — out of 17 that started the case — that kept Texas v. Kennedy alive after its original target, transgender protections, was already gone. With the Trump administration's help, the case ended with a judge erasing the federal rule telling states to serve disabled people in their communities instead of institutions. Paxton's office called it a win against the "radical trans agenda" and didn't mention what was actually removed.

Source

• A lawsuit from GOP states to end trans protections ended by rolling back disability rights — Stateline, via Arizona Mirror