I know, I’m as shocked as you are.
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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton relied on false claims, exaggerations and errors to conclude that gender-affirming medical care constitutes child abuse, a report by university-level medical experts has concluded.
Paxton’s legal opinion on transgender care, issued in February, formed the basis of Gov. Greg Abbott’s directive requiring Child Protective Services to investigate all reports of families with children who are receiving gender-affirming care.
But the report published Monday by medical and legal experts at Yale University and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center said Paxton’s opinion was so full of errors and false claims that it appeared to have been “motivated by bias” and crafted to reach a predetermined goal: denying medical care to transgender youths.
“The repeated errors and omissions in the AG Opinion are so consistent and so extensive that it is difficult to believe that the opinion represents a good-faith effort to draw legal conclusions based on the best scientific evidence,” the report’s executive summary said.
“These are not close calls or areas of reasonable disagreement,” the report added. “The AG Opinion … ignores established medical authorities and repeats discredited, outdated, and poor-quality information.”
[…]
Monday’s report focused on puncturing a central premise behind Paxton’s legal analysis: that the surgical removal of genitals and reproductive organs is standard medical care offered to transgender pediatric patients.
“In fact, the authoritative protocols for medical care for transgender children and adolescents, which define what we term ‘gender-affirming care,’ specifically state that individuals must be over the age of majority before they can undergo such surgery,” the study said.
In Texas, the age of majority is 18.
Paxton also falsely implied that puberty blockers — medication meant to delay physical changes to give transgender youths time to consider more permanent options — and hormones are given to young children, the report said.
“In fact, the standard medical protocols recommend drug treatments only for adolescents — and not prepubertal children,” the study said.
The authors — three medical doctors and three doctors of psychology — all treat transgender children and adolescents in daily clinical practice and hold positions at major medical schools, the report said. A law professor rounded out the study’s team.
Their report criticized Paxton for presenting a “warped picture of the scientific evidence” by exaggerating potential risks and ignoring evidence of the benefit that such care provides in the treatment of gender dysphoria, the distress caused when a person’s body does not match their gender identity.
“The standard medical protocols were crafted by bodies of international experts based on a solid scientific foundation and have been in use for decades. Thus, treating gender dysphoria is considered not only ethical but also the clinically and medically recommended standard of care,” the report said.
You can read the report if you want. It will surely be helpful if you need to have a conversation with someone for whom facts and science and expertise still matter. The thing to remember here is not that Ken Paxton was unable to understand this, or didn’t have access to people who could explain it to him. This was about affirming a worldview and appealing to an identity, for the purposes of maintaining and enhancing political power. As such, while it’s always good to have the facts at hand, this isn’t about the facts. It’s not going to be for as long as the Republican Party is like this. All we can do is try to win elections, and then once we have done that use the power we’ve gained from them to do good things. Easier said than done, I know, but here we are.