Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced on Friday a significant settlement with Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston over that hospital’s long practice of harming minors with cross-sex hormones and transgender surgeries. The settlement focuses on billing fraud, a much-discussed aspect of transgender medical programs in which providers bill insurance for falsely described procedures that appear to represent real treatment for sick children.
The terms of the settlement are extraordinary, starting with the hospital’s commitment to open a detransition-support clinic for the growing number of young people who were given the false promise that they could change their sex or “gender.” Destransitioners, who decide to abandon transgender identity, often have surgical wounds and developmental harm from puberty blockers. “For the first five years,” Paxton’s announcement says, “all services provided through the Detransition Clinic will be funded by Texas Children’s and be free of charge to patients.”
The hospital will also pay $10 million to the state for “billing Texas Medicaid for unallowable and illegal ‘gender-transition’ interventions,” while also agreeing to “fire, permanently and irrevocably terminate all existing privileges, and never again hire or credential five woke doctors who performed harmful medical interventions on Texans.”
The hospital also agrees never to perform falsely labeled “gender-affirming” services again, although those harmful medical procedures for children have already been outlawed in Texas.
In a defiant statement to the news media that has since been taken down, Texas Children’s Hospital denied any wrongdoing, depicting the settlement as a reaction to unfair political pressure: “Today, we made the difficult decision to settle with the Texas Attorney General and the Department of Justice, closing a chapter that has been wrought with falsehoods and distractions. To be clear — we are settling to protect our resources from endless and costly litigation.”
The Texas surgeon and trans procedures whistleblower Dr. Eithan Haim offered this response on social media:
Reached for comment on Friday, Haim sent The Federalist a GIF:
Erin Friday, a parents’ rights activist in California who has battled “trans kids” madness in that state, told The Federalist that the detransition clinic is the particularly important part of the settlement. “Having worked with detransitioners for years,” she said, “I am thrilled that this settlement includes much-needed medical services for these harmed individuals.”
Pro-transgender activist groups reacted with predictable outrage. In a statement to the Texas Tribune, Andrea Segovia of the Transgender Education Network of Texas expressed particular alarm about the detransition-support clinic:
“When trans people decide to detransition, it is because of social pressures from their job, from their friends, from their family, from their government,” Segovia said. “It is not normally because of healthcare complications.”
In fact, a growing number of youthful detransitioners describe, precisely, the alarming medical complications and physical pain that come with unneeded puberty blockers and surgery on healthy bodies.
Young detransitioners have also begun to win costly medical malpractice lawsuits against doctors who perform transgender procedures.
The Federalist wanted to ask Paxton’s office if state prosecutors had considered criminal charges for billing fraud in addition to the civil settlement, but the phone in the media affairs office of the Texas Attorney General’s Office went unanswered on Friday afternoon.
