FRIDAY, Oct. 18, 2024 (HealthDay News) — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued a Dallas doctor for allegedly providing transgender care to nearly two dozen minors in violation of state law.
In the lawsuit filed Thursday, Paxton claimed that Dr. May Chi Lau, who specializes in adolescent medicine, provided hormone replacement therapy to 21 minors who were transitioning from October 2023 to August 2024. Last year, Texas enacted a law banning hormone replacement therapy and other forms of gender-affirming care for minors.
“Texas passed a law to protect children from these dangerous, unscientific medical interventions that have irreversible and harmful effects,” Paxton said in a statement announcing the lawsuit. “Doctors who continue to provide these harmful ‘gender transition’ medications and treatments will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
The statement also claimed that Lau used “false diagnoses and billing codes” to mask “illegal prescriptions.”
Paxton’s lawsuit is the first filed in the country by an attorney general against an individual doctor alleging violation of a restriction on transition-related care for minors, NBC News reported.
Neither Lau nor his employer, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, responded to a request for comment from NBC News.
If Lau is found guilty, she could lose her license to practice medicine and face a financial penalty of hundreds of thousands of dollars, NBC News reported.
The Texas law includes a provision that allows doctors to continue prescribing puberty blockers and hormone therapy to patients who began treatment before June 1, 2023, so they can safely stop taking the drugs, according to the lawsuit. by Paxton.
Minors are also required to have attended at least 12 counseling or psychotherapy sessions for at least six months before beginning treatment. It was unclear whether Lau’s patients would be eligible for that provision, NBC News said.
Twenty-six states prohibit at least some forms of gender-affirming care for minors, according to the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBTQ think tank.
The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to hear oral arguments and decide this session whether to strike down a similar law in Tennessee, NBC News reported. How the court rules on Tennessee’s law will affect similar restrictions in other states.
Major medical organizations, such as the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, say that transition-related care is an effective and medically necessary way to treat gender dysphoria, which is the distress felt by people whose gender identities gender differ from the genders assigned at birth.
More information
Johns Hopkins offers more information about transgender health care.
SOURCE: Texas Attorney General’s Office, press release, October 17, 2024; NBC News
