By Robin Foster HealthDay Reporter
FRIDAY, Oct. 18, 2024 (HealthDay News) — A Dallas doctor has been sued by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton 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 damaging effects,” Paxton said in a statement announcing the lawsuit. “Doctors who continue to provide these harmful ‘gender-transition’ drugs and treatments will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”
The statement also claimed that Lau used “false diagnoses and billing codes” to mask “unlawful prescriptions.”
Paxton’s suit 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 her 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 medical license and face a financial penalty of hundreds of thousands of dollars, NBC News reported.
Texas’ law includes a provision that allows doctors to continue to prescribe puberty blockers and hormone therapy to patients who began treatment before June 1, 2023, to safely wean them off the medications, according to Paxton’s suit.
Minors are also required to have attended at least 12 counseling or psychotherapy sessions for at least six months before they start treatment. It wasn’t clear whether Lau’s patients could fall under that provision, NBC News said.
Twenty-six states ban 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 rule this session on whether to strike down a similar law in Tennessee, NBC News reported. How the court rules on the Tennessee law will affect similar restrictions in other states.
Major medical organizations, such as the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, state that transition-related care is an effective and medically necessary way to treat gender dysphoria, which is distress felt by people whose gender identities differ from their genders assigned at birth.
More information
Johns Hopkins has more on transgender healthcare.
SOURCE: Texas Attorney General’s office, news release, Oct. 17, 2024; NBC News
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