Texas Children’s Hospital will develop a “detransition clinic” and fire five physicians as part of a unique settlement with the state, the Office of the Texas Attorney General announced Friday.
Such a clinic could be the first of its kind, the attorney general’s office said in a news release. It would focus on providing medical care to patients who had undergone gender-affirming healthcare and work toward reversing the effects of that healthcare.
The Houston-based hospital system is also required to pay $10 million for billing Texas Medicaid for prior gender transition treatments, along with firing and permanently cutting ties with five doctors who performed such treatments, according to the attorney general.
In a lengthy statement, representatives from Texas Children’s Hospital stated they had cooperated with the attorney general’s office, producing more than 5 million documents and conducting multiple investigations.
“All reviews and investigations continue to support the facts — we have been compliant with all laws,” Texas Children’s said in a statement. “Today, we made the difficult decision to settle with the Texas Attorney General and the Department of Justice, closing a chapter that has been wrought with falsehoods and distractions. 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.”
Texas Children’s did not provide specific information regarding the development of a detransition clinic, including when it might be in operation and what it might entail.
Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican who is running for U.S. Senate, had announced an investigation into Texas Children’s, the largest children’s hospital in the United States, in 2023, just as the state Legislature was passing a law that banned gender-affirming healthcare for minors. The Texas Supreme Court upheld the law in 2024.
Paxton stated his office had secured the settlement in coordination with the U.S. Department of Justice.
“I applaud Texas Children’s Hospital for changing course and committing to being a part of the solution by agreeing to form a first-of-its kind Detransition Clinic that will help provide free care to those who have been victimized by twisted, morally bankrupt transgender ideology,” Paxton said, in part, in a news release.
According to Paxton’s office, all services provided by the detransition clinic will be funded by Texas Children’s and be free of charge to patients for the first five years of its operations.
Texas Children’s will also agree not to provide gender-affirming care to minors, to implement ethics measures and “amend its bylaws to trigger automatic relinquishment of privileges for any physician who violates Texas’s prohibition on medical interventions to ‘transition’ kids,” the AG’s office said.
