Doctor Sued for Treating Trans Minors in Texas
The first-of-its-kind lawsuit alleges that Dr. May Chi Lau illegally prescribed hormone treatments to 21 minors, in violation of a state ban on transition-related care.
In the first-of-its-kind lawsuit in the United States, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued a Dallas doctor, accusing her of violating Texas’s law barring physicians from providing gender-affirming care to minors.
Paxton alleges that Dr. May Chi Lau, a specialist in adolescent medicine, prescribed and provided hormone treatments to 21 minors between October 2023 and August 2024 to assist the youth in transitioning genders.
Under the ban, which was passed last year and upheld by the Texas Supreme Court in June after being challenged in a lawsuit, doctors are prohibited from providing puberty blockers or hormone replacement therapy to minors and can have their license to practice medicine permanently revoked and be fined hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The ban contains an exception for youth who had begun the process of transitioning before June 1, 2023, and who had attended 12 or more sessions of mental health counseling or psychotherapy at least six months before beginning treatment.
However, the law also directs providers to eventually wean those same patients off the hormones they are taking over time “and in a manner that is safe and medically appropriate and that minimizes the risk of complications.”
It’s unclear whether the minors allegedly treated by Lau fall under the exception — in which case, she is simply being targeted to send a warning message to other doctors to stop treating transgender patients altogether.
“Texas passed a law to protect children from these dangerous unscientific medical interventions that have irreversible and damaging effects,” Paxton said in a statement on October 17. “Doctors who continue to provide these harmful ‘gender transition’ drugs and treatments will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”
Paxton alleges that Lau falsified medical records by using “false diagnoses and billing codes” to conceal the fact that she was writing prescriptions for hormones.
The lawsuit is the first in the country to be brought by an attorney general against an individual doctor for allegedly violating a state’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors.
Paxton is one of several Republican attorneys general who have subpoenaed hospitals and gender-affirming care clinics for patients’ records in an effort to see how many minors have attempted to transition.
Texas is one of 26 states that have banned minors from accessing transition-related treatments.
Critics claim that gender-affirming treatments are experimental, based on flawed science, and are harmful to patients in the long term. Many also assert that there is no such thing as gender identity and that transgender people simply have psychological issues that need to be resolved.
However, many major medical organizations, including the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, argue that providing transition-related care is the appropriate treatment for a person struggling with gender dysphoria, in which people feel distress when their gender identity does not align with their assigned sex at birth.
The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments on December 4 in a case challenging the constitutionality of a similar prohibition in Tennessee. The decision in that case will determine whether such prohibitions are legal in the 25 other states with nearly identical laws.
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