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: