Texas AG sues second doctor accused of providing transgender care to minors

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued an El Paso doctor on Tuesday, accusing him of providing transition-related medical care to nearly two dozen minors in violation of state law.

Paxton alleged that Dr. Hector M. Granados, a pediatric endocrinologist, provided puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy to 21 minors from April 2023 to August for the purpose of transitioning genders. Texas enacted a law, Senate Bill 14, last year banning gender-affirming care for anyone under 18.

“Texas is cracking down on doctors illegally prescribing dangerous ‘gender transition’ drugs to children,” Paxton said in a statement Wednesday. “State law forbids prescribing these interventions to minors because they have irreversible and damaging effects. Any physician found doing so will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

In the statement, Paxton also accused Granados of intentionally “falsifying medical records, prescriptions, and billing records” to evade the law. 

Granados, who did not immediately return a request for comment, is the second doctor Paxton has sued for allegedly violating state law. 

Less than two weeks ago, Paxton sued Dallas-based Dr. May Chi Lau, who specializes in adolescent medicine, for allegedly providing gender-affirming care for 21 minors. Neither Lau nor her employer, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, have commented on the case publicly and did not immediately return requests for comment.

If the doctors are found to be in violation of state law, they could have their medical licenses revoked and face financial penalties in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The lawsuits are the first in the country by an attorney general charging individual doctors with violating the restriction on transition-related care for minors. Laws restricting access to transition-related care for minors exist in 26 states, according to the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBTQ think tank. 

Gov. Greg Abbott signed Senate Bill 14 into law in June 2023 and the Texas Supreme Court upheld the state’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors in June. Abbott and Paxton are Republican. 

The U.S. Supreme Court is expected in its current session to hear oral arguments and rule on whether to strike down a similar law in Tennessee. How the court rules on the Tennessee law is expected to affect similar laws in other states, including Texas.

Paxton described gender-affirming care as “experimental” and said “no scientific evidence supports their supposed benefits.” However, major medical organizations, such as the American Medical Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, disagree, arguing that transition-related care is an effective and medically necessary way to treat gender dysphoria, which is the distress felt by people whose gender identities differ from their sex assigned at birth.

The Texas lawsuits come just ahead of the presidential election, where transition-related care has become somewhat of a flashpoint. 

Former President Donald Trump’s campaign drew attention to the issue in ads criticizing Vice President Kamala Harris’ prior support for allowing inmates in federal prisons to have access to gender-affirming care. Trump has also vowed to abolish gender-affirming care for trans minors if he is re-elected and has repeated false claims that students are undergoing transition-related surgeries during the school day. 

NBC News asked Harris about her position on gender-affirming care last week. She appeared to dodge the question, first saying she would follow the law and then adding: “That is a decision that doctors will make in terms of what is medically necessary.”