Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who continues to suffer from advanced TDS (Transgender Derangement Syndrome), has filed suit against Children’s Health System of Texas and Dallas-area pediatric doctor Jason Jarin for “for hurting kids by performing illegal ‘transition’ procedures and engaging in Medicaid fraud in violation of Texas law.”
Children’s Health is the country’s seventh-largest pediatrics hospital.
Paxton, who also continues to use the power of the Office of Attorney General to try and score points with right-wing voters in his campaign to replace Republican John Cornyn in the U.S. Senate, said in a press release, “I will use every legal tool available to ensure radical gender activists like Jarin face justice for hurting our kids. This criminal extremist not only permanently harmed children, but he also then defrauded Medicaid and stuck Texas taxpayers with the bill for this insanity. Experimental ‘transition’ procedures on minors are illegal, unethical and will not be tolerated in Texas.”
Dr. Jarin is a pediatric gynecologist and division director at Children’s Health who “saw patients for gender interventions” at the hospital system’s Plano and Dallas locations, according to Paxton’s overly-dramatic press release. Calling Dr. Jarin a “radical gender activist,” Paxton claimed he and Children’s Health have “billed Texas Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program for gender interventions on children as young as 9 years old.” These “interventions,” Paxton says, involve “regularly perform[ing] procedures and medicat[ing] both female and male patients with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.”
What the science says
To be clear, actual medical experts and numerous scientifically-based studies — as opposed to right-wing politicians who like to target transgender individuals to try and gain political points with misinformed and biased right-wing voters — have said repeatedly that refusing proper gender-affirming care to transgender children can have severe detrimental effects on those children’s mental and physical well-being.
The Association of American Medical Colleges, for instance, found that that trans youth who are denied access to gender-affirming healthcare “report higher rates of suicidal ideation and suicide attempts,” whereas studies show that trans teens who receive puberty blockers or hormones “had 73 percent lower odds of experiencing self-harm or suicidality” compared to those denied proper health care.
AAMC also found that inability to access proper health care causes increases in depression and anxiety, sometimes by two or three times as much. Denying care also “exacerbates gender dysphoria,” which can “interfere with daily life, school and socialization.”
AAMC also found that refusing them proper health care such as puberty blockers can force trans youth to go through “irreversible physical changes” and can lead to unhealthy coping mechanisms such as “restricting food or water intake to manage body shape or avoid using public restrooms.”
And Human Rights Watch notes that families of trans youth “are often forced to choose between moving to new states to access care or watching their children suffer,” which can lead to significant financial and emotional strain.
Swarupa Deb, a human rights lawyer and sociologist with a Ph.D. who is based in India, in an article in Harvard University’s Health and Human Rights Journal, goes so far as to declare refusing gender-affirming care for trans youth to be a human rights violation.
Deb writes: “When discrimination-free health care is withheld in the name of ethical regulation, the outcome is not mere medical caution or risk assessment but an immediate violation of the universal human rights to life, equality and freedom of expression. Such regulations redistribute harm into the lives of children, impacting their everyday realities as they concern access to education, social adjustment, peer pressure, and self-image.”
Deb concludes by calling for “the recognition of gender-diverse children as present rights holders, entitled to dignity and participation in decision-making concerning their health care, rather than as future contingencies to be governed.”
The lawsuit
Paxton’s lawsuit against Dr. Jarin and Children’s health claims that they “committed unlawful acts under the Texas Health Care Program Fraud Prevention Act, including by repeatedly changing patients’ gender in claims to Texas Medicaid in order to get illegal and unallowable claims paid.”
The right-wing senatorial candidate also charges that Children’s Health and Dr. Jarin “likely engaged in false, misleading and deceptive acts in violation of Texas law [by] falsifying or misrepresenting medical records, prescriptions, and billing submissions to pharmacies, insurers, and Medicaid.”
Paxton’s political theater lawsuit is asking for more than $1,000,000 in the case, including civil penalties against Children’s Health and Jarin.
— Tammye Nash