Three Texas doctors have been forced to stop practicing medicine after becoming targets in Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s ongoing war against transgender people, specifically trans youth, in the Lone Star State.
Paxton’s move to force the three out of practice comes amid growing concern over a shortage of doctors in the state. Dr. Christian Cable with Baylor College of Medicine in Temple says Texas only has 200 physicians for every 100,000 people compared to 250 doctors for every 100,000 across the nation, according to reports by ABC News Channel 25.
A press release issued by Paxton’s office earlier this month claimed the trans-obsessed AG “has stopped three Texas doctors from illegally providing children with dangerous ‘gender transition’ drugs while litigation continues.”
In October and November last year, Paxton sued physicians May Lau, M. Brett Cooper and Hector Granados, doctors who provided gender-affirming health care to trans youth, claiming the three violated the state’s intrusive law prohibiting such medical to those under the age of 18.
Paxton’s press release Dr. Lau and Dr. Cooper entered into Rule 11 agreements which stopped them from practicing medicine on patients entirely. Dr. Granados is under a court-ordered injunction preventing him from providing any ‘gender transition’ drugs to children.”
Paxton claims to have “obtained evidence” that the three doctors “illegally provided high-dose cross-sex hormones to dozens of minor patients for the direct purpose of ‘transitioning’ the child’s biological sex. The doctors allegedly used false diagnoses and billing codes to mask these unlawful prescriptions.”
Paxton has not explained how his office managed to compile such evidence, considering that an individual’s medical records are supposed to be private.
In 2024, as part of his efforts to pursue women seeking reproductive health care, including abortions, Paxton filed suit in federal court against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to try and overturn the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act —HIPAA which was signed into law in 1996 by President Bill Clinton and which protects patients’ private health information. This came after Paxton was himself sued in December 2023 for trying to force Seattle Children’s Hospital to give him the private medical records of Texas children receiving gender-affirming care there.
SB 1, approved by the Texas Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott effective September 2023, prohibits gender-affirming care such as hormone therapy and surgery for transgender minors.
Gender transition surgery is rarely performed on anyone under the age of 18. A study by Harvard’s T.J. Chan of Public Health found no gender-affirming surgeries had been performed on any child age 12 or under in 2019, and only 0.0021 percent — less than one-tenth of 1 percent — of teens ages 15-17 had undergone any kind of gender-affirming surgeries and the majority of those that did had “top” surgery.
That same study, in fact, found that “cisgender minors and adults had substantially higher utilization of analogous gender-affirming surgeries than their [transgender and gender-diverse] counterparts.”
While Paxton claims that “growing scientific evidence strongly suggests that ‘gender transition’ interventions prescribed to or performed on children in an attempt to anatomically or hormonally alter their biological sex characteristics have damaging, long-term consequences,” and that such treatments “experimental, and no scientific evidence supports their supposed benefits,” the actual medical and scientific experts say the exact opposite
The American Medical Association supports gender-affirming care as medically necessary and evidence-based and actively advocates in support of such care for trans youth and adults. And, as Texas Tribune noted, “Leading health care organizations in Texas — including the Texas Medical Association, Texas Counseling Association and Texas Pediatric Society — say gender-affirming care is the best way to provide care to transgender children.”
Paxton’s press release announcing the suits against the three doctors came shortly after Donald Trump signed executive orders prohibiting gender-affirming care for minors and saying the federal government recognizes only two sexes rather than a gender spectrum, and that a person’s “sex” is decided at conception and assigned at birth.
Paxton, in his press release regarding his action against the three Texas doctors, declared, “In America, we recognize that there are only two unchangeable genders and that children should be protected.”
Despite Trump’s and Paxton’s claims to have science on their side, however, scientific experts — again — say just the opposite. Numerous studies have shown that neither sex (based on biological traits) nor gender (a term that reflects how a person lives within society) is binary, and that despite the simple “XY” definition demanded by a sex/gender binary, there are at least 14 different naturally occurring sex chromosome variations.
— Tammye Nash