Cisgender kids in Texas can’t get care due to anti-trans laws

For Texas children with special medical needs, a 2023 state law banning gender-affirming care for minors has had unplanned consequences, according to a new investigation by The Texas Tribune.

Texas passed a law in June 2023 banning doctors from providing residents under age 18 gender-affirming care, blocking hormone therapy as well as gender-affirming surgeries, which are already rare.

While the bill maintained hormone therapy for reasons unrelated to gender-affirming care, the Tribune found it had a chilling effect on medical providers who offer those services. As a result, some cut off much-needed medical services.

In El Paso, the publication found that an endocrinologist stopped prescribing puberty blockers after the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, accused him of providing gender-affirming care to minors, according to the Tribune.

As the only pediatric endocrinologist in the city, that meant some families had no local options to continue care. For one family, that meant the difficult decision of moving out of state to ensure their child, whose medical needs related to Bardet-Biedl syndrome require puberty blockers, according to the Tribune.

In recent years, Texas has focused on restricting access to gender-affirming medical care for its youth, while similar efforts play out on the national level.

Attorney General Paxton recently issued a legal opinion that the state’s gender-affirming care ban for minors also applied to talk therapy. Plus, the attorney general has taken other doctors to court over allegations that they are providing gender-affirming care.

For residents like Gabrielle Jones-Radtke, the mother moving her family out of state to maintain hormone therapy treatments for her daughter, the Tribune found these efforts have created new obstacles in the state’s medical landscape at large.

“I love Texas, but right now,” Jones-Radtke told the Tribune, "it doesn’t feel like they love us back.”

This article was written as part of the Future of Queer Media fellowship program at The Advocate, which is underwritten by a generous gift from Morrison Media Group. The program helps support the next generation of LGBTQ+ journalists.