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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Friday that the state has secured a $10 million settlement from Texas Children’s Hospital that also “compels the creation of the country’s first-ever Detransition Clinic” and requires the firing of “five woke doctors.”
The settlement, which will be paid to the state, follows an investigation by the Department of Justice’s into the provision of transition-related medical care for transgender youth.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche touted the outcome in his own statement, writing, “The Justice Department will use every weapon at its disposal to end the destructive and discredited practice of so-called ‘gender-affirming care’ for children.” (Contrary to that claim, major medical associations support gender-affirming care for youth.)
In its own statement, as UPI reported, Texas Children’s characterized the investigation as “an unconscionable campaign of mistrusts and mischaracterizations of gender-affirming care.”
“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,” the statement read, adding, “To be clear — we are settling to protect our resources from endless and costly litigation. This settlement will allow us to redirect those precious resources to focus on life-saving care and groundbreaking discoveries of our exceptional clinicians and scientists.”
That statement appears to have since been deleted from the Texas Children’s website, with the original hyperlink returning a 404 error. As of this writing, it has not been reposted to the hospital’s media release page.
It is not yet clear what a “detransition clinic” would amount to in practice, but American conservatives have increasingly relied on a tiny but vocal subset of people who have detransitioned and oppose transgender rights to further their political agenda.
According to Paxton’s office, the “detransition clinic” would be fully funded by Texas Children’s and offered free of charge for the first five years of its operation. Studies suggest that very few trans Americans detransition, and those who do largely cite familial, social, and culture pressure as the inciting reason.
“Paxton is blackmailing a hospital system into creating a resource that no one is asking for,” Equality Texas CEO Brad Pritchett said in a statement to the Associated Press. “It ignores the actual science and years of data about the overwhelming benefits of gender-affirming care.”
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