6.6.23 – Epoch Times
“Some of Nation’s Largest Pediatric Hospitals Will No Longer Offer Children Gender Modification”
By Darlene McCormick Sanchez
Excerpts from this article:
…Potentially thousands of Texas children seeking to change their gender identity will no longer have access to puberty blockers, sterilization, and permanently disfiguring “gender-transition” surgeries in the state under a new law signed by Texas Gov. Gregg Abbott.
The Republican governor signed Senate Bill 14 on June 2, making the Lone Star State the most populous state to prohibit sex-change “treatments” for children.
…It will stop the nation’s largest pediatric healthcare provider, Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, from offering “gender-modification” procedures to minors.
And it will prohibit three more of the country’s largest pediatric hospitals from offering services to children who want to change their gender.
Both Texas Children’s Hospital, with 973 beds, and Children’s Medical Center of Dallas, with 490 beds, currently offer gender-altering services to youths.
HALTING SURGERIES IN TEXAS
The new law just signed by Abbott bans surgeries that sterilize children by removing parts of their reproductive systems. It outlaws mastectomies for girls hoping to live more like boy
It disallows the prescribing of drugs that induce temporary or permanent infertility, such as cross-sex hormones. And it prohibits removing any otherwise healthy or non-diseased body part.
The Lone Star State joins 17 other states now restricting “gender transitioning” for children. The Texas law will go into effect on Sept. 1.
…Under the new law, children in Texas currently on hormones for gender dysphoria will have to be weaned off those drugs.
Doctors who perform gender modification on children stand to lose their medical licenses in Texas. The bill gives the Texas attorney general the ability to enforce the law.
The Republican-led effort to pass SB 14—a priority for Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican—met stiff resistance from Democrats as it was debated in May.
GOP advocates of the bill said cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers, and surgery could cause irrevocable health problems or sterility in children.
Their Democrat counterparts argued that the decision to put children on hormone treatment and surgery should be left to parents, their children, and doctors.
Journalist Chris Rufo…posted an undated internal email from Texas Children’s Hospital CEO Mark Wallace on Twitter in May.
…Action will be taken over the next few months to comply with the new law that will “prohibit procedures and prescription treatments for gender transitioning, gender reassignment, and gender dysphoria” for children, Wallace wrote.
…Another large hospital, Children’s Medical Center of Dallas, will have to stop treating hundreds of minors with hormone “therapy.”
The hospital, part of the Children’s Health System of Texas, operates a gender clinic in conjunction with UT Southwestern Medical Center, also in Dallas.
The clinic, started by Dr. Ximena Lopez in 2014, is called the GENder Education and Care, Interdisciplinary Support (GENECIS) program.
Lopez, a pediatric endocrinologist, has said publicly that she will close her practice in July and move to California because of the new law.
State lawmakers, including Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton, have been pushing to ban transgender medical procedures for children for the past two years.
…Paxton was part of a campaign to apply enough political pressure to hamstring GENECIS in November 2021, when the clinic was closed to new patients.
DO NO HARM
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb is chairman of the board for Do No Harm, a group that fights “radical” ideologies in medicine.
Texas’ new law is significant because it affects large treatment centers for transgender youth, Goldfarb told The Epoch Times.
Children who are confused about their gender need mental health care instead of surgeries or hormones, Goldfarb said.
“The vast, vast majority of these children bring with them a tremendous burden of psychological difficulty,” he said.
“I hope [the hospitals] pivot to the right kind of care for these children.”
…Once the children are allowed to transition to a different gender, advocates think the psychological problems experienced by these children will go away, he added.
But evidence from several studies suggests that the opposite happens, he said.
“The literature doesn’t show their psychological problems will go away.”
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