Texas Children’s Hospital, the largest children’s hospital in the country, must create the country’s “first-ever detransition clinic” as part of a settlement agreement that concludes a yearslong investigation by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. As part of the deal announced Friday, the Houston hospital also agreed to terminate five doctors who previously provided transition care to children and to pay $10 million to resolve allegations that the hospital improperly billed the state’s Medicaid program for transition care.
For the first five years of the clinic’s operation, Texas Children’s must provide detransition care for free. A hospital spokesperson said “the detransition clinic will formalize the supportive, multidisciplinary services we already deliver to all patients who need our care,” though officials have not detailed exactly what the clinic will offer. The hospital declined to provide details about the terminated employees, saying “our top priority throughout this settlement discussion was around protecting our physicians.”
The hospital said it agreed to the settlement after cooperating throughout the three-year investigation, during which it produced more than 5 million documents and conducted multiple investigations of its own. The hospital stated: “To be clear—we are settling to protect our resources from endless and costly litigation. This settlement will allow us to redirect those precious resources to focus on the life-saving care and groundbreaking discoveries of our exceptional clinicians and scientists.”
Detransitioning, which involves no longer identifying as transgender or stopping medical transition, is rare. Studies have estimated that between 1% and 10% of trans people detransition, and less than 1% say they regret their transition. The most common reasons cited for detransition were pressure from a parent, harassment or discrimination, and that transitioning was too hard. Most major medical associations in the U.S., including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Psychological Association, support gender-affirming care access for minors. The settlement marks the first resolution in the Justice Department’s ongoing national investigation into transition care for minors.
This article is an AI-assisted summary. All facts and figures are drawn from the original report: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/texas-childrens-hospital-detransition-clinic-settle-doj-paxton-rcna345340