Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Thursday charged a Dallas doctor with violating state law by offering gender-affirming treatments to minors. The lawsuit marks the first time an attorney general has filed a legal challenge against an individual doctor for allegedly violating a state restriction on gender-affirming care for minors.
Paxton, a Republican, claimed that Dr. May Chi Lau, an associate professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas and a physician who specializes in adolescent medicine, provided hormone replacement therapy to 21 minors from October 2023 to August of this year. for the purpose of “transitioning” their gender, according to the indictment.
Texas came into effect in 2023 SB 14a law banning minors from receiving hormone therapy and puberty blockers, and requiring medical professionals to have their licenses revoked if they provide care to trans minors.
“Texas has passed a law to protect children from these dangerous, unscientific medical interventions that have irreversible and harmful consequences,” Paxton said in a statement statement. “Physicians who continue to provide these harmful medications and ‘gender transition’ treatments will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”
Paxton claims Lau is a “radical gender activist” because of her research background and practice working with transgender and gender-nonconforming youth. In the lawsuit, he wrote that Lau used “false diagnoses and billing codes of transgender patients” to write prescriptions for puberty blockers and testosterone for patients who filled or refilled them after SB 14 went into effect.
More than thirty major medical associations consider this care medically necessary and “lifesaving” for transgender youth.
Neither Lau nor her employer, UT Southwestern, immediately responded to requests for comment.
Under state law, Lau’s medical license could be revoked and she could be fined hundreds of thousands of dollars if she is found violating the law.
Paxton has a long history of using his power as attorney general to crack down on transgender people’s access to gender-affirming health care. In recent years, Paxton has done the same summoned hospitals in Texas and beyond for medical records of trans youth, investigated pharmaceutical companies that produce puberty blockers and sought data on the number of Texans changing genders on their state driver’s licenses.
Two years ago, he also issued an opinion concluding that gender-affirming treatments for children constituted “child abuse” under state law.
This summer, the Texas Supreme Court enforced the state ban following a legal challenge over the constitutionality of the ban and pleas from parents of trans youth and from medical professionals to reject it.
The legality of these bans depends on the outcome of a pending Supreme Court case, LW v. Skrmetti, which will determine whether a Tennessee ban on gender-affirming care for minors violates the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The judges are expected to issue advice next year.
