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“No,” she said.

“What did you make of the instruction to not put anything in writing?”

“It was very unethical,” Ms. Mulanax said.

The Texas Department of Family and Protective Services has struggled for years to care for children in its foster care system and to conduct investigations into child abuse.

The agency has been the subject of a decade-old federal lawsuit over its foster care system, in which children faced abuse as well as long waits to be adopted or placed in safer homes. Federal monitors have been overseeing the process of carrying out judicial orders since 2019, among them a directive to improve the handling and investigation of reported child abuse.

A federal court held an emergency hearing on Thursday, unrelated to the fight over transgender children, regarding a report of sex trafficking, abuse and neglect of children at a foster care facility in Bastrop that is under contract to the state. Mr. Abbott called the report “abhorrent” in a statement, and said that “child abuse of any kind won’t be tolerated in the state of Texas.”

But the bounds of what constitutes child abuse was the question being wrestled with at the hearing on Friday in front of Judge Meachum.

Ms. Mulanax, the state investigations supervisor, said that she disagreed with the governor’s order and with her agency’s response to it, and that she had decided to resign because of it. “I have always felt that the department has the children’s best interest at heart,” she said. “I no longer feel that way with this order.”

Reports of parents possibly providing puberty-blockers, hormones or other medically accepted treatments to their transgender children were being handled differently from other reports of child abuse, she testified. “These are not being treated the same,” Ms. Mulanax said during the hearing. “We had to be investigating these cases.”