Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing a doctor for allegedly providing irreversible transgender medical procedures to 21 minors.
A Texas law, which took effect in September 2023, prohibits experimental transgender medical interventions for children, including such as surgeries, puberty blockers, and hormone replacement therapy.
The Office of the Attorney General of Texas says it obtained evidence revealing that Dr. May Chi Lau illegally provided sex-change hormones to 21 minors for the purpose of “transitioning” the children. The doctor allegedly used false diagnoses and billing codes to mask these unlawful prescriptions, according to Paxton’s news release.
The attorney general’s office did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.
Lau is the medical director of the adolescent and young adult clinic at Children’s Medical Center Dallas. She is also an associate professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
Paxton’s lawsuit, filed Thursday, marks the first time a state attorney general has sued an individual doctor over transgender procedures for minors, NBC News reported.
“Texas passed a law to protect children from these dangerous, unscientific medical interventions that have irreversible and damaging effects,” Paxton said in a statement. “Doctors who continue to provide these harmful ‘gender transition’ drugs and treatments will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”
Children’s Medical Center Dallas is one of 225 hospitals and health care facilities that have provided irreversible transgender procedures to children, according to medical watchdog Do No Harm’s database.
Children’s Medical Center Dallas, where Lau practices, had 49 sex-change patients and wrote 361 prescriptions for hormones and puberty blockers before the Texas law banning transgender procedures for children passed.
An adolescent medicine specialist, Lau is a co-author of several papers on child gender dysphoria, including “Transition from Pediatric to Adult Care for Transgender Youth: A Qualitative Study of Patient, Parent, and Provider Perspectives”; “Developing a Curriculum on Transgender Health Care for Physician Assistant Students”; and “Gender-Affirming Hormone Therapy in Cystic Fibrosis: A Case of New Pseudomonas Infection.”
Lau’s profile on the Children’s Medical Center Dallas website said she “particularly enjoys” helping patients though “various adolescent issues.”
“Adolescents have their parents to guide them during these sometimes-tough years, and as an adolescent medicine physician, Dr. Lau endeavors to assist parents in this process as adolescents and parents face the most difficult issues,” her biography says.
Children’s Medical Center Dallas did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment.