Throughout much of the 2000s, the mainstream medical profession has bought into the notion that even children should be given sex-change treatments if they ask for them.
Now the American Medical Association; the American Society of Plastic Surgeons; and the national health ministries of Great Britain, France, Sweden and Finland have all changed their recommendations. This is in response to medical research that shot down the previous claims of pro-transgender doctors, plus a wide-scale public backlash leading to state laws against those treatments.
The medical profession now needs, if possible, to reverse the damage it has caused. A settlement in a Texas court case is forcing the issue.
For a decade, Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston had been providing so-called “gender-affirming care” to children with gender dysphoria diagnoses. Children 10 and under who expressed discontent with their physical sex were taught how to dress, act and use the pronouns of the opposite gender. Children 11 to 14 were given puberty blockers, even though this could mean permanent infertility and despite the fact that 80% of pediatric gender dysphoria cases resolve on their own with the onset of puberty. Children 14 to 17 were given cross-hormone treatments — that is, boys were given female hormones and girls were given masculine hormones, increasing still further the likelihood of sterility. Older adolescents aged 15–21 were eligible for “top surgeries” — double mastectomies for girls and plastic surgery for boys. (Thankfully, “bottom surgeries,” which remove the genitals and reproductive organs and use plastic surgery to construct opposite-sex simulations, were not performed on minors at Texas Children’s Hospital.)
In 2022, when the state of Texas passed a law forbidding such “gender-affirming care” for minors, Texas Children’s Hospital announced that it would comply with the law. But whistleblowers later revealed that doctors continued giving children gender reassignment treatments, disguising their actions by using different diagnostic billing codes. Instead of classifying them under the various F64 categories that cover “Gender Identity Disorder,” these illicit treatments were classified under E34 categories for “Endocrine Disorder.”
Such false coding constitutes insurance fraud. The state prosecuted the hospital, as did the U.S. Department of Justice, for fraudulent Medicaid billing.
Before the case went to trial, Texas Children’s Hospital agreed to a settlement: The hospital must terminate its relationship with the five doctors involved with the transition of minors. It must pay a fine of $10 million. And it must open a “detransition clinic” to care for those who were victims of “gender-affirming care” as children but who now regret their treatment and affirm their physical sex.
This will be the first detransition clinic in the nation. According to the terms of its legal settlement, Texas Children’s is required to offer detransitioning services — procedures to reverse earlier surgeries and hormone treatments — free for five years.
We might wonder, given its track record, if Texas Children’s is the right hospital to operate this clinic. Despite the settlement, it continues to deny wrongdoing. Pro-transgender activists are dismissive of detransitioners, claiming there are hardly any (though they number up to 13% of the “re-assigned”) and implying that detransitioners are the ones with mental problems.
In LW’s April issue, we discussed Fox Varian, who received gender-reassignment surgery when she was 16 to help her identify as a boy. Three years later, after her gender dysphoria faded, she sued the doctors for malpractice, winning a $2 million judgment. Other such cases are in the works, and many more will emerge once legal and medical redress are possible.
Medical professionals who colluded in the sterilization and mutilation of children committed a grievous sin against God and his creation, and they misused their vocations, which require loving and serving their patients by healing and easing pain rather than harming them. Now they must do what they can to reverse that harm.
This article originally appeared in the October 2026 print edition of The Lutheran Witness.
Cover image: Getty Images
