Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has won a battle in his ongoing war against the happiness and wellbeing of transgender people, announcing today (Friday, May 15) that he has secured a settlement that requires Texas Children’s Hospital to create a “detransition clinic” AND pay the state $10 million, according to reports by The Texas Tribune.
Paxton, who suffers from one of the most severe cases of TDS (transgender derangement syndrome) ever reported, says this new “clinic” would offer medical care to patients “who were subjected to ‘gender-transition’ procedures,” and would do so free of charge to patients for its first year in operation.
The Tribune notes: “The settlement also requires the hospital to pay $10 million for billing Texas Medicaid for ‘illegal gender-transition interventions,’ including by using false diagnosis codes, and compels Texas Children’s to terminate and revoke the medical privileges of multiple physicians.”
Texas Children’s has issued a statement saying this was a “difficult” decision hospital officials reached to “close a legal chapter that has been ‘wrought with falsehoods and distractions.”
According to the statement, over the last three years they hospital has wasted time having to produce more than five million documents to both the state and the U.S. Department of Justice.” But, the statement continued, Texas Children’s has been “compliant with all laws.”
“To be clear,” the statement stressed, “we are settling to protect our resources from endless and costly litigation.”
Despite the scare tactics that Paxton and other right-wingers with TDS use to rile up their uneducated base voters, gender-affirming care for children under 18 rarely involves surgical procedures or any other irreversible treatments.
The medical community consensus, in fact, is that gender-affirming care is not only safe for transgender minor, it saves lives.
According to the American Medical Association, youth who received gender-affirming medications such as puberty blockers or hormones had 73 percent lower odds of suicidalityover a 12-month period compared to those who did not. And gender affirming care is associated with 60 percent lower odds of moderate to severe depression.
On the other hand, according to the AMA, medical experts say denying such care — the way Paxton and his crew are doing — is linked to increased risk of self-harm, substance use disorder and suicide.
(In other words, when the right-wingers tell you they are just doing what’s best for the children, they are lying.)
— Tammye Nash