Two Texas lawmakers are standing behind the law they authored that bans sex alteration surgeries for minors, despite lawsuits from activist groups.
As The Dallas Express reported, the ACLU and other LGBTQ groups sued Texas after the state passed a law preventing doctors from performing sex alteration surgeries on and administering transgender hormones to children.
The suit alleged that the law, Senate Bill 14, violated the Texas Constitution “by prohibiting, penalizing, and denying coverage for the provision of the very medical treatment parents seek for their children with gender dysphoria — treatment that their transgender children want and that their children’s doctors and medical provides have prescribed as medically necessary.”
In a joint statement provided to The Dallas Express, Sen. Donna Campbell (R-New Braunfels) and Rep. Tom Oliverson (R-Cypress), who are both medical doctors, defended their bill and expressed confidence that it would beat the legal challenge.
“The lawsuit filed seeking to prohibit the enforcement of Senate Bill 14 is not unanticipated, but we are confident the law is on our side, and that any attempts to overturn this legislation will ultimately be unsuccessful,” the pair of legislators said.
“As we carefully laid out during the passage of Senate Bill 14, gender modification treatments and procedures in minors have no scientifically-verifiable, proven benefit,” they suggested. “The doctors who perform them are often ignorant of the research or indifferent to how evidence-based medicine works.
“A growing list of European countries are recognizing that these treatments carry serious, life-long risks and are still, in the words of Finland’s healthcare authority, an ‘experimental practice.’”
“We believe that extraordinary interventions require extraordinary justification, and that justification doesn’t exist in this case,” Campbell and Oliverson asserted. “The State of Texas maintains its stance that there is insufficient evidence supporting continued medical experimentation on children.”
Pointing to the impact these surgeries and procedures have, they claimed, “A growing number of teenagers and young adults are telling us that they were irreparably harmed by procedures their doctors assured them, against all available evidence, are ‘medically necessary’ and ‘life-saving.’”
“A growing number of parents attest that they were lied to or bullied into acquiescence,” they added. “While we recognize the complexities surrounding the treatment of gender dysphoria in children, we believe it is the sworn duty of the Texas Legislature to protect the safety of the children of our state — including from well-meaning but misguided physicians.”
“We emphasize that no systematic reviews have demonstrated the value of these treatments, while some of the harms — like lifelong sterility for children who undergo full medical transition — are biological certainties,” the statement read.
“We are confident in our position that Senate Bill 14 is the tool needed to ensure that children and families in our state are protected against harm. Safeguarding their future remains a top priority for the state of Texas, and we will continue to act in their best interests,” the senator and representative concluded.
Since Gov. Greg Abbott signed the law, activist groups have begun setting up financial programs to fund minors’ transportation across state lines so they can undergo sex alteration procedures, as reported by The Dallas Express.
While announcing the fund’s establishment, Ricardo Martinez, executive director of Equality Texas, called SB 14 “oppressive,” claiming transgender children were being “bullied by the state” and the law “should be blocked and found unconstitutional.”
