Texas attorney general Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit on Thursday accusing a doctor at Children’s Medical Center Dallas of illegally providing sex-change treatments to at least 21 minors, some as young as 14 years old.
Paxton alleges May Lau, medical director of the center’s adolescent and young adult clinic, offered “high-dose cross-sex hormones” to the minors for the purpose of “’transitioning’ the child’s biological sex.” He claims Lau provided the hormones despite a state ban on sex-change procedures for minors, which took effect in September 2023 and was upheld by the state supreme court earlier this year.
“Texas passed a law to protect children from these dangerous unscientific medical interventions that have irreversible and damaging effects,” Paxton said in a statement. “Doctors who continue to provide these harmful ‘gender transition’ drugs and treatments will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”
State law allows the Texas Medical Board to “revoke the medical license or other authorization to practice medicine of a physician who violates” the law, SB14.
Paxton alleges Lau falsified medical records, prescriptions, and billing records to mislead pharmacies and insurance providers and to make it appear as though prescriptions for hormone therapy were not being used to treat gender dysphoria.
For example, the lawsuit says Lau used a diagnostic code of endocrine disorder to bill the insurance company for a “puberty blocker device” for a 15-year-old. The suit alleges Lau has used the billing code to “falsely represent that she’s treating patients for an unspecified endocrine disorder, when in fact she is transitioning their biological sex or affirming their belief that their gender identity is inconsistent with their biological sex.”
Texas is one of 25 states that has laws limiting or prohibiting minors from accessing puberty blockers, hormones, and gender-transition surgery.
Earlier this year, nonprofit Environmental Progress obtained internal documents from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health in which its experts privately acknowledged that young patients often lack proper understanding about the severity of the life-altering medical decisions they’re making and the possible consequences involved, including sterility, derailed sexual development, and general regret.
This despite the group publicly advocating in its standards of care for those with diagnosed “gender incongruence” to have access to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries, as long as patients can demonstrate “the emotional and cognitive maturity required to provide informed consent/assent for the treatment.”
The documents showed that WPATH president Marci Bowers acknowledged during a January 2022 board meeting that the effects of puberty blockers on fertility and the “onset of orgasmic response” are not fully known. Boys who experience early puberty blocking can have “problematic surgical outcomes” and extreme difficulty climaxing, she said.
Other WPATH members have said the current transgender-treatment protocol might be correlated with advanced disease, such as cancer. One doctor reported treating a 16-year-old who developed large liver tumors after being prescribed testosterone for a year and norethindrone acetate, which can serve as a puberty-blocker substitute to suppress menstruation, for several years.
WPATH member Dr. Daniel Metzger also warned it can be difficult to obtain informed consent from minors “who haven’t even had biology in high school yet,” the documents show.
Many young patients don’t understand that medical interventions can cause irreversible physical changes. He explained some patients don’t realize they can’t receive hormone therapy only to have a lower voice and without also growing facial hair.