Oct. 18 (UPI) — Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Thursday that he has filed a lawsuit against a Dallas physician for providing gender transition care to almost two dozen minors against a controversial state law.
Paxton charged that Dr. May Chi Lau, who specializes in adolescent medicine, provided hormone replacement therapy to 21 minors in a period stretching from last October to this August, in violation of Senate Bill 14, which bans the practice and other gender-affirming care to 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. “Doctors who continue to provide these harmful ‘gender transition’ drugs and treatments will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”
The American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, however, have called such care meant to treat gender dysphoria, effective and medically necessary.
The suit, the first of its kind by an attorney general targeting an individual doctor for violating a law banning gender-affirming care, alleges that Lau used “false diagnoses and billing codes” to hide the “unlawful” treatments.
If found guilty, Lau could lose her medical license and be fined hundreds of thousands of dollars under the law.
While the Texas Supreme Court has allowed the law to stand after appeals, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments this session on a similar law in Tennessee, which could affect the Lone Star State’s legislation.
“The laws are inflicting profound harms on transgender adolescents and their families by denying medical treatments that the affected adolescents, their parents, their doctors, and medical experts have all concluded are appropriate and necessary to treat a serious medical condition,” the Justice Department said in court documents supporting the minors and their parents, according to The Hill.