Last summer, Texas Governor Gregg Abbott signed SB-14 into law, banning transgender surgery, puberty blockers, and hormone treatments for children. Texas is one of at least 24 states to impose such rules. Unfortunately, the people at Seattle Children’s Hospital didn’t seem to get the message. They reportedly continued to write transgender prescriptions for pediatric patients in the Lone Star State. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton investigated that matter and concluded that the law was being violated, despite efforts by Seattle Children’s Hospital to rebuff him. Now, however, facing potential court action, the hospital has backed down and agreed to stop sending out those prescriptions. (NY Post)
Seattle Children’s Hospital has agreed to stop providing care in Texas after backlash for allegedly helping minors in the Lone Star state receive gender transition medication, The Post has exclusively learned.
The hospital is suspected of providing support for gender transitions to Texas-based patients from its Seattle facility, which writes prescriptions for sex change hormones to their pharmacies in the Lone Star state, according to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Paxton says this would violate state law, which prohibits drug and surgical sex changes for kids. However, when his office made enquiries they were rebuffed.
In December, Seattle Children’s Hospital attempted to block Paxton’s actions by bringing a lawsuit against Texas. They took a very unique approach to the effort, however. Rather than claiming they had the right to supply prescriptions to Texas children, they claimed that Texas was interfering in interstate commerce. This was an odd approach to take because the prescriptions would have been filled and paid for in Texas even if they were written in Oregon. But for now, the matter appears to be settled.
It would be interesting to know precisely how the prescription process was handled but the details haven’t been provided. Were the doctors at Seattle Children’s Hospital coordinating with doctors in Texas? If so, the Texas doctors would likely have still run afoul of the law. If they weren’t, then were the Oregon doctors just mailing out prescriptions across the country without the pediatric patients ever being seen or screened by a medical professional? If that was the case, that clearly sounds like medical malpractice.
Of course, it wouldn’t be terribly surprising to learn that they were doing just that. Almost everything about these pediatric trans treatments sounds like malpractice in my opinion. When we recently looked at the new study published by doctors in Great Britain, it became obvious that many health professionals feel the same way. There is little to no evidence suggesting that any of these treatments provide any long-term benefits and there are many examples showing that they can all produce lasting, permanent harm. The Brits concluded that most gender-confused children should receive a full range of testing for various mental illnesses and counseling in the form of talk therapy rather than being put on pills or puberty blockers and undergoing genital mutilation surgery.
This case out of Texas leads me to once again wonder how the Europeans managed to get so far ahead of us on this question. They are clearly miles ahead of the people at Seattle Children’s Hospital, that’s for sure.
Sadly, at least for the children of Texas, nothing that Greg Abbott or Ken Paxton can do can prevent the parents of any gender-confused children from taking their kids to Oregon or some other blue state to receive these “treatments.” (Assuming the parents have been equally captured by the woke brigade.) That would require some sort of intervention from the Health Department, the American Medical Association, or similar regulating authorities. We are unlikely to see anything like that happen any time soon, however. There is too much money to be made in the field of trans “medical care.”