Texas AG Sues Doctor Over Gender Affirming Care For Minors | EUROtoday

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued a Dallas physician on Thursday, alleging that she violated state legislation by offering gender-affirming remedies to minors. The swimsuit marks the primary time an legal professional normal has introduced a authorized problem in opposition to a person physician for allegedly violating a state restriction on gender-affirming take care of minors.

Paxton, a Republican, alleged that Dr. May Chi Lau, an affiliate professor on the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and a doctor who focuses on adolescent medication, offered hormone substitute remedy to 21 minors from October 2023 to August of this yr for the “purposes of transitioning” their gender, in line with the swimsuit.

In 2023, Texas enacted SB 14a legislation that bars minors from acquiring hormone remedy and puberty blockers and mandates that medical professionals may have their licenses revoked if they supply that care to trans minors.

“Texas passed a law to protect children from these dangerous unscientific medical interventions that have irreversible and damaging effects,” Paxton mentioned in a assertion. “Doctors who continue to provide these harmful ‘gender transition’ drugs and treatments will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

Paxton alleges that Lau is a “radical gender activist” due to her analysis background and follow working with transgender and gender-nonconforming youth. In the swimsuit, he wrote that Lau used “false diagnoses and billing codes on transgender patients” to put in writing prescriptions for puberty blockers and testosterone for sufferers who stuffed or refilled them after SB 14 took impact.

Over 30 main medical associations have deemed this care medically essential and “lifesaving” for transgender youth.

Neither Lau nor her employer, UT Southwestern, instantly responded to requests for remark.

Under state legislation, Lau’s medical license might be revoked and she or he might face a penalty of a whole bunch of 1000’s of {dollars} if she is discovered to be in violation of the legislation.

Paxton has a protracted historical past of utilizing his energy as legal professional normal to focus on transgender individuals’s entry to gender-affirming well being care. Over the final a number of years, Paxton has sub store backyard hospitals in Texas and past for medical data of trans youth, investigated pharmaceutical firms that manufacture puberty blockers and sought knowledge on the variety of Texans who modified their gender on their state driver’s licenses.

Two years in the past, he additionally issued an opinion through which he concluded that gender-affirming remedies for kids constituted “child abuse” beneath state legislation.

This summer season, the Texas Supreme Court upheld the state’s ban after a authorized problem on the constitutionality of the ban and pleas from mother and father of trans youth and from medical professionals to reject it.

The legality of those bans hinges on the end result of a pending Supreme Court case, L.W. v. Skrmetti, which can decide whether or not a Tennessee ban on gender-affirming take care of minors violates the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The justices are anticipated to subject an opinion subsequent yr.