Texas attorney general sues doctor over allegedly giving cross-sex hormones to children

CNA Staff, Oct 18, 2024 / 15:45 pm

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing a doctor for reportedly violating state law by prescribing transgender drugs to underage children.

A law passed by the state Legislature last year prohibits doctors from performing “gender transition” surgeries on minors; it also forbids doctors from prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to children.

The state Supreme Court upheld that law in June of this year. On Thursday Paxton said in a press release that a doctor in the state had violated the law by providing illegal hormones to children.

A Dallas-area doctor “illegally provided high-dose cross-sex hormones to 21 minor patients for the direct purpose of ‘transitioning’ the child’s biological sex,” the release said.

The doctor “allegedly used false diagnoses and billing codes to mask these unlawful prescriptions,” it said. 

The state’s filing in district court alleged that pediatrician May Lau “engaged in deceptive trade practices, including by misleading pharmacies, insurance providers, and/or patients.”

The doctor allegedly falsified medical records in order to prescribe testosterone to young girls for “gender transitions.” 

The state described Lau as a “scofflaw” who put “the health and safety of minors at risk” in the alleged fraud scheme. The hormones were allegedly prescribed to “at least 21 minor patients.” 

“Texas passed a law to protect children from these dangerous unscientific medical interventions that have irreversible and damaging effects,” Paxton said in the press release. 

“Doctors who continue to provide these harmful ‘gender transition’ drugs and treatments will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law,” he said. 

The availability of transgender treatments for children — including, in some cases, the castration and/or sterilization of boys and girls under the age of 18 — has become one of the most contested parts of the ongoing debates around LGBT politics. 

Earlier this month a watchdog group revealed that nearly 150 Catholic hospitals across the United States provided children with transgender drugs or performed gender-transition surgeries on them between 2019 and 2023. 

Those medical procedures contradict Church teaching and the U.S. bishops’ prohibition on Catholic health care providers offering such interventions.

The U.S. Catholic bishops clarified in March of last year that “gender transition” interventions are not to be performed because they do not respect the fact that God has created each person as a unity of body and soul.

“The body is not an object, a mere tool at the disposal of the soul, one that each person may dispose of according to his or her own will, but it is a constitutive part of the human subject, a gift to be received, respected, and cared for as something intrinsic to the person,” the bishops’ Committee on Doctrine wrote.