Queering Morales v. Turman: Gender, Sexuality, and Juveniles' Right to Treatment

Abstract

This article complicates understandings of Morales v. Turman, a class action lawsuit filed in 1971 on behalf of juveniles in six Texas Youth Council (TYC) institutions, as a victory for incarcerated youth. Drawing on Morales's substantial legal archives, this article highlights the ways the lawyers, social workers, psychologists, and psychiatrists who came together on behalf of incarcerated youth in this case understood the state's capacity to foster and enforce gender and sexual conformity as a social good. While they hoped to protect incarcerated children from state violence and to affirm their constitutional rights, these experts helped to embed a pathological conception of homosexuality and gender nonconformity into the broader legal battle for juvenile offenders' "right to treatment." In ushering in a treatment-focused juvenile justice regime, the expert witnesses who testified on behalf of the plaintiffs also helped to foster the TYC's turn away from traditional carceral institutions toward community-based residential facilities.