Texas court allows ‘gender affirming’ doctor to take on new teen patients despite law prohibiting sex changes for minors

Dr. Ximena Lopez, a pediatric endocrinologist at Children’s Medical Center (CMC), and an associate professor at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, is permitted to block the puberty of minors with drugs also used to chemically castrate sex offenders, despite there being mounting evidence that the treatment protocol is both harmful and inappropriate.

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Lopez began legal proceedings earlier this year after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton declared gender-affirming care for minors to be “child abuse”.

Gov. Greg Abbott then announced that the Department of Family and Protective Services would be investigating any family who affirmed their child and took them for hormonal interventions.

Trans activist groups and gender-affirming healthcare providers argue that delaying access to this irreversible medical pathway puts young people at risk of suicide, despite there being no reliable evidence to support this claim.

“Puberty is a ticking clock,” Leslie McMurray of the Resource Center, a nonprofit focused on LGBTQIA+ health in Dallas, told Medpage Today. “So for all these kids that are entering puberty, what do you tell them? ‘Just wait another year?’ Some of these kids are going to take their own lives.”

Murray, like many other child-sex-change enthusiasts, seems not to be aware that suicide prevention groups advise against telling vulnerable groups that they are at risk of suicide as this increases the likelihood that they will experience suicidal thoughts. It has long been known that suicide is socially contagious.

According to Medpage Today, one court filing stated that the treatment Lopez provides adheres to the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) guidelines, which are “universally medically accepted.”

However, WPATH guidelines are far from universally accepted. Earlier this week, Sweden officially cut ties with the activist organization masquerading as a scientific body citing its recently released Standards of Care 8 (SOC8) that removed all lower age limits for hormonal interventions and included a chapter on eunuchs which the group defines as an innate gender identity even children can possess. One Swedish doctor wrote that this is evidence WPATH is “an obviously activist organization.”

Sweden will no longer allow the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for under-18s except under the strictest of clinical trial settings after a systematic review of the evidence for their use revealed it to be of very poor quality. Swedish gender clinics will instead offer “psychological support to help youth live with the healthy body they were born with.” Finland has already taken this step, and England is expected to in the coming months.

However, the Texas court ruled that neither the state nor Lopez's employer can interfere with how she treats her patients.

CMC and UT Western had ceased to take on new patients after Paxton’s February decision, but after the lengthy legal battle Lopez is now taking new patients. However, McMurray is concerned about a pending bill that seeks to define attempting to change the sex of children as child abuse.