The first legal test of Texas’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors has begun. Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed a lawsuit against a doctor for prescribing hormones to minors.
The doctor is May Lau, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center who specializes in adolescent medicine at Children’s Medical Center Dallas. The lawsuit accused Lau of prescribing gender-affirming hormones to 21 patients between the ages of 14 and 17.
“Lau is a scofflaw who is putting the health and safety of minors at risk by prescribing testosterone, a controlled substance, to biological female minors for the purposes of transitioning their biological sex or affirming their belief that their gender identity is inconsistent with their biological sex,” the lawsuit reads.
Lau has not yet commented on the suit. Children’s Center has issued a statement affirming it follows all state laws.
The lawsuit alleges that Lau prescribed hormonal treatments to minors for purposes other than gender-affirmation as a form of insurance fraud and in an effort to evade the law. It should be noted that Senate Bill 14, which created the ban, does not ban the prescription of hormones or puberty blockers for non-gender-affirming care reasons. Hormones and puberty blockers are used for a variety of conditions in minors, though it apparently only illegal to use them if the patient is trans.
Senate Bill 14 went into effect in September 2023 and has been widely condemned by the medical community. Gender-affirming care has been proven time and again to be correlated with lower instances of self-harm, suicide, depression, and other mental health conditions in children who express genders differently than the ones they were assigned at birth.
Every major medical organization in the United States backs gender-affirming care as evidence-based practice, including the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, and the American Academy of Pediatrics. Contrary to popular conservative talking points, being transgender or non-binary is not considered a mental illness, and both are treated as legitimate gender identities by all major medical governing bodies.
Nonetheless, Paxton has relentlessly pursued the elimination of trans children in Texas for years. He has backed investigations into the parents of trans youth and calls gender-affirming care “child abuse.” This comes as part of a larger anti-trans cultural panic that involves people claiming children are being abducted from schools to have gender reassignment surgeries or that children identify as animals and insist on using litter boxes in classrooms. None of the claims have ever been substantiated, but they have helped fuel the attorney general’s crusade against trans youth.
Senate Bill 14 was upheld as constitutional by the Texas Supreme Court in June. Doctors caught providing gender-affirming care can lose their medical licenses for doing so. The matter is almost certain to end up before the U.S. Supreme Court eventually. Until then, Paxton has chosen his first target to make an example of.