Texas AG sues doctor who allegedly provided transgender care to 21 minors

MicroWave@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 378 points – Texas AG sues doctor who allegedly provided transgender care to 21 minors
nbcnews.com

The suit is the first by an attorney general against an individual doctor for allegedly violating a restriction on gender-affirming care for minors.

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.

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To add to the pile of evidence that this is all just hateful bigotry and has nothing to do with children's safety, cisgender children can still legally access these drugs, but not for the purpose of transitioning genders. The same drugs can still be used to delay aggressive puberty, which is a standard and relatively common usage, as well as other conditions that might affect a cisgender child. But a trans child who needs the same drugs for a different reason, will be told too bad, you're out of luck. So two children could walk into the same doctor's office and one will be turned away and forced to suffer through their gender dysphoria, with permanent repercussions for their mental health and body, and the other child will be treated with the drugs they need to be treated with. It's absurdly unfair, unequal, and purposefully harmful to a vulnerable population.

Tbf there are all kinds of medicine that are ok for one thing but not another, cocaine for instance.

Yeah. Cocaine is ok if you're trying to get an edge on the competition as a stock trader. But, not ok if you're black.

The difference being, in this case, that this type of hormone treatment is a medically responsible and widely accepted treatment for both things.

I don’t disagree with you at all.

It wasn’t me arguing against the post, just thinking out loud basically.

I like the philosophy aspect of finding where the line is.

I do it with like everything.

Figure this one out, usually people find things that are fluffier less edible, but a squirrel and a rat are essentially the same animal but people will totally eat squirrel, but I don’t ever hear of people commonly eating rat even when other food is available.

The fluffiness actually works against it.

A pigeon and a dove are the same damn thing only differently colored.

Most people wouldn’t eat a pigeon, but they would eat a dove or a squab

The problem is that you're not the one deciding what drug to prescribe. The government is.

And even if you were, shouldn't the decision on "where to draw the line" be made by the parent, the child, and their doctor?

We can have all the philosophical conversations you want but we have people who are being affected by this right now.

We can have all the philosophical conversations you want but we have people who are being affected by this right now.

Yeah, this is why I downvoted the original "cocaine" comment.

Even if it was "thinking out loud," it's just an absurd thing to say when we are talking about children's lives here.

Are you implying that it's okay for cisgender folks to get HRT and gender-affirming care, but it's not okay if for transgender folks to seek the same care? Explain to me how your assertion here applies to what we're talking about.

Not even a little bit

I feel so enlightened to your point then. /s

I’m confused, do you want me to be against her for trans people?

I’m not cool with that, trans people are people and their health care is just as important as ours

Then what was your point with your original comment? It came across as exclusionary to trans folks.

Doctors aren't prescribing cocaine for the hell of it, though. Same thing with puberty blockers. Think we can trust doctors' judgment when it comes to the drugs they prescribe.

Worked with fentanyl, right?

Doctors aren't prescribing, nor are they they source of, illicit fentanyl. The ease of synthesis means that clandestine labs can make a shit ton of the stuff, it's that simple.

Doctors legally prescribing fentanyl is what created the crisis. HHS estimates there are about 6.5m prescriptions per year in the 2010s

That aside: corruption via pharmaceutical sales influence is a well known problem anyway. Medical doctors are not unbiased paragons of virtue

Look at the stats, fentanyl has always been rarely prescribed and even more rarely prescribed compared to other opioids. The fentanyl crisis is a crisis of economics: there is less profit to be made in creating, smuggling and selling other opioids compared to fentanyl.

If you want to be accurate, doctors prescribed non-fentanyl opioids in situations where they weren't needed, often illegally, when those prescriptions ran out, that caused a heroin crisis. That heroin crisis became a fentanyl crisis when drug dealers stopped selling heroin in favor of the cheaper and much stronger fentanyl.

Really? That's gonna be the argument you go with?

If I actually wanted I could have just deleted it and not have to deal with this, I don’t have a horse in this race.

There will be side effects from everything, who am I to judge how medications should be used.

Except we don't have any widespread evidence for cocaine being taken outside of highly specific medicinal cases being helpful to the health and wellbeing of the individual.

When it comes to gender affirming care, we have substantial evidence that proves it is safe and effective, as even a cursory glance at medical research on the topic will show:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanam/article/PIIS2667-193X(23)00118-7/fulltext

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3109/09540261.2015.1115753

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/article-abstract/2789423

https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/trgh.2015.0008

As doctors continue to flee the state

My doctor closed her practice in the state. She's the kindest doctor I've ever had the pleasure of dealing with, and I'm sad that I have to find a new one.

Fuck Ken Paxton. I hope he gets trapped in quicksand inhabited by starving sand fleas.

Or maybe strapped to a tree in a forest full of hungry grizzly bears

Too quick. Lets strap him down in a coop full of hungry chickens.

Quick sand is a far too awesome way to go for someone like this.

This doc is a hero!

Also, wouldn’t it be cool to send a message to Paxton, and send a few fed lawyers to be her defense…. ? (Biden… I’m looking at you.)

I met this dude a few years ago and he is straight up nuts. It wasn't like a brief thing. I spent hours with him. He's as much of a douche bag as he seems like. I remember him bragging about all the lawsuits he filed against the Biden administration - something like 80+ - and ranting about the stolen election. It amazes me that he holds elected office. He's a twat.

Reminder that Texas has been Republican controlled for 28 years.

They've been voting for this reality for decades. People should move away from Texas.

Reminder that Texas's legislature and Congressiinal delegations were majority Democrat for 150 years, and it wasn't until the boost from W's Presidential election that they got their first majority.

They then gerrymandered the shit out of the state out of cycle (it has been redistricted in response to the 2000 census the previous session) to flip it from majority-democrat to a 2/3rds Republican delegation to the House in a single election cycle.

Texas isn't nearly as red as people think. They got a slim majority in 2000 and 2002 and then rigged the game with gerrymandering and voter suppression.

The doctor or the attorney general?

The AG. I didn't think there would be any confusion as to who I was referring to. LOL

The elected doctor. /s

Jk, I had a hard time pinpointing the target of speech as well, the final comment about holding elected office was the only indicator I found. Most people are really poor communicators/writers, eh?

I mean also all the lawsuits he filed against the Biden administration makes it seem more likely it's the conservative ag and not the liberal doctor...

Paxton gets mentioned on almost a weekly basis and it's always something scummy that he's done. I assumed he was the only douche bag in this story. Then there's the lawsuits against the Biden administration, complaints about a stolen election, and the part about being elected. I figured that was enough context to indicate who I was talking about. Maybe the doctor is a douche bag too, but I didn't meet him so I don't know.

Is this the worst Republican in the bunch? Could be.

Politician, perhaps. But I'm going to have to put a spotlight on Jonathan Mitchell, who came up with the structure behind the Texas Heartbeat Bill, which did an end run around judicial review by allowing enforcement via civil action by damn near anyone. The usual way to legally dispute a potentially unconstitutional law is to sue the government officials that enforce it, but because there wasn't a specific person there was no real way to bring it to the judicial branch.

Sounds like a great strategy for reasonable gun legislation. Is your neighbor not responsibly securing their firearm? Sue them and get some money out of it.

We should punish the people hurting our children, like this jackass attorney general preventing them from getting treatment for Gender Dysphoria.

If he wanted to find a criminal, just look in the mirror.