By Brendan Pierson
(Reuters) – Texas on Thursday filed what appears to be the first lawsuit against a doctor for allegedly violating the state’s ban on providing gender-affirming care, such as puberty blockers and hormones, to transgender minors.
In a complaint filed in the District Court of Collin County, Texas, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton claimed May Lau, a pediatrician at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, prescribed testosterone to at least 21 minor patients seeking to transition from female to male. Paxton in the complaint called Lau “a scofflaw who is putting the health and safety of minors at risk.”
Lau and UT Southwestern did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed the gender-affirming care law in June 2023. The law states that the medical license of any doctor providing drugs or surgery for the purpose of gender transition to minors must be revoked.
Lau wrote almost all of the prescriptions shortly before the law took effect in September 2023 so that her patients could fill them later, according to the complaint, but Paxton said that counted as providing banned care after the law took effect. He also said that Lau wrote two illegal testosterone prescriptions while the law was in effect.
Paxton further claimed that Lau falsified records to conceal the fact that her patients were transgender, violating Texas’s business code.
The lawsuit seeks money damages and a court order preventing Lau from violating the law in the future.
The Texas Supreme Court in June upheld the state’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors, rejecting arguments by families with transgender children and doctors that the law was discriminatory and deprived parents of their rights under the state constitution to make decisions concerning their children’s care.
Twenty-five Republican-led states have enacted laws or policies that ban or restrict gender-affirming care for minors, according to the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBTQ think tank, and many of those laws have been challenged in court.
The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to consider a challenge to Tennessee’s ban, which could decide whether other states’ bans will survive as well.
(Reporting By Brendan Pierson in New York, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Lisa Shumaker)
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