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 from October 2023 to August for the purpose of transitioning genders. Texas enacted a law, Senate Bill 14, last year 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 alleged that Lau used “false diagnoses and billing codes” to mask “unlawful prescriptions.”
Neither Lau nor her employer, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, immediately replied to requests for comment.
If Lau is found to be in violation of the law, her medical license could be revoked and she could face a financial penalty of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Paxton’s suit is the first in the country by an attorney general against an individual doctor alleging violation of 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 before June 1, 2023, in order to wean them off 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 before they started 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 ban at least some forms of gender-affirming care for minors, according to the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBTQ think tank.
Gov. Greg Abbott signed Texas’ restriction in June 2023, and a court blocked it after families and doctors sued. In September 2023, the Texas Supreme Court allowed the law to take effect pending an appeal from the state, and this June, it vacated and reversed the previous injunction, allowing the law to stand.
The U.S. Supreme Court is expected in its current session to hear oral arguments and rule 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 the 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 identities differ from their genders assigned at birth.
