Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued a Dallas doctor Thursday accusing her of providing transition-related care to nearly two dozen minors in violation of state law.
Paxton alleged that Dr. May Chi Lau, who specializes in adolescent medicine, provided hormone replacement therapy to 21 minors between October 2023 and August for the purpose of transitioning genders. In 2023, Texas enacted a law, Senate Bill 14, 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 Thursday. “Doctors who continue to provide these harmful ‘gender transition’ drugs and treatments will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”
The statement issued by Paxton’s office alleged that Lau used “false diagnoses and billing codes” in order to mask “unlawful prescriptions.”
Neither Lau nor her employer, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, immediately returned requests for comment.
If found to be in violation of the law, Lau could have her medical license revoked and face a financial penalty of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Paxton’s suit is the first in the nation by an attorney general against an individual doctor for allegedly violating a restriction on transition-related care for minors.
Texas’ law includes a provision that allows physicians to continue to prescribe puberty blockers and hormone therapy to patients who began treatment prior to June 1, 2023, in order to wean them off of the medications “over a period of time and in a manner that is safe and medically appropriate and that minimizes the risk of complications,” according to Paxton’s suit. Minors are required to have attended at least 12 mental health counseling or psychotherapy sessions for at least six months prior to starting treatment. It’s unclear whether Lau’s treatment of the minors could fall under that provision.
So far, a few attorneys general, including Paxton, have subpoenaed hospitals and practices that provide such care to minors for those patients’ records. Twenty-six states have bans on at least some forms of gender-affirming care for minors, according to the LGBTQ think tank Movement Advancement Project.
Gov. Greg Abbott signed Texas’ restriction on transition-related care in June 2023, though it was initially blocked by a court following a lawsuit from families and doctors. In September 2023, the Texas Supreme Court allowed the law to take effect pending an appeal from the state, and in June of this year, it vacated and reversed the previous injunction, allowing the law to stand.
The Supreme Court is expected in its current session to hear oral arguments and make a ruling on whether to strike down a similar law in Tennessee. How the court rules on the Tennessee law is expected to affect similar laws in other states.
The statement from Paxton’s office described gender-affirming care as “experimental, and no scientific evidence supports their supposed benefits.”
Major medical organizations such as the American Medical Association and American Academy of Pediatrics disagree, arguing that transition-related care is an effective and medically necessary way to treat gender dysphoria, which is distress felt by people whose gender identity differs from their gender assigned at birth.
