Texas AG Adds Texas Children’s Hospital to Trans Care Probe

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is investigating a second Texas hospital to determine if it is “unlawfully” providing gender transition care to minors.

Paxton said Friday he is planning to investigate Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, in an announcement just two weeks after he said he’d opened a similar probe into Dell Children’s Medical Center in Austin, reports The Houston Chronicle on Saturday.

“Recent reports indicate that Texas Children’s Hospital may be unlawfully performing such procedures, and my office is working to uncover the truth,” Paxton said in his announcement. “I am committed to investigating any entity in our state to ensure that our children are protected.”

Doctors who had been treating transgender teens at Dell Children’s left the week after Paxton announced the investigation there, according to KUT, Austin’s NPR affiliate. Families also got calls telling them that appointments had been canceled.

However, Gov. Greg Abbott has not yet signed a bill that will outlaw young people in Texas from receiving transgender care, including puberty blockers or hormone medications, and will make performing transition-related surgeries illegal.

The state Senate agreed to a final draft version of the bill earlier this week, and once Abbott signs it, the law will take effect on Sept. 1.

Meanwhile, a district court ruling last year paused a statewide directive to treat and investigate treatment for transgender young people as child abuse, but Paxton continues to insist that children are being abused when undergoing gender procedures or receiving treatment.

“Though many unhinged activists compromising the healthcare field think otherwise, children are not to be treated as science experiments,” Paxton said. “Doctors and hospitals should not be pushing mutilative and irreversible ‘gender transitioning’ procedures that will negatively impact innocent children for the rest of their lives.”

Texas Children’s Hospital, in a statement Friday afternoon, said the Houston-based facility has a mission of providing high-quality care for all of its patients.

Last year, Texas Children’s stopped providing hormone therapy for transgender patients after a directive from state leaders to investigate such treatment as child abuse but returned to providing the care after the courts blocked the directive.

“Throughout the policy debate surrounding gender medicine, our healthcare professionals have always and will continue to prioritize the care of our patients within the bounds of the law,” a spokesperson said, adding that the hospital will not be canceling appointments related to care for transgender patients.

Hormone therapy and puberty blockers are common treatments for transgender youth, while gender reassignment surgeries are rare.

Paxton’s investigations follow reports from right-leaning groups concerning the state of transgender care in his state, including a series of tweets and an article from the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank.

In the posts, an activist published what he claimed was evidence that Texas Children’s has provided gender transition care secretly. He included photographs of patients’ medical records, redacting their names.

Harris County attorney Christian Menefee has called for “swift and appropriate action” in connection with the leaked records. He also called Paxton’s investigation “legally baseless.”

“This illicit release of medical records puts children and their families at risk, and swift action must be taken to ensure that this does not happen again,” said Menefee. “I have spoken with representatives at Texas Children’s Hospital and understand that the hospital will fully investigate how this happened and notify all impacted families if their information was released.”

He said the hospital will likely disclose what it finds to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“If a hospital employee leaked these medical records, they must be fired,” he said. “If it was a hospital vendor, their contract must be terminated.”

The spokesperson for Texas Children’s confirmed the hospital has both investigated the leak and has reported its findings to federal authorities.