Less than two months ago, officials at Childrens Medical Center Dallas told a local website that their program offering mental health services and hormone treatments to transgender children was vital for young people with gender dysphoria.
Hospital officials said the care available through the program, which focuses on multi-level care for those children and is considered the first of its kind in the Southwest, helped reduce the significant suffering and extraordinarily high suicide rates among transgender kids.
Last week, the GENder Education and Care, Interdisciplinary Support program was formally dissolved. Known as GENECIS, the program has been criticized in recent weeks by activists who have organized protests targeting hospital board members and accused the program of committing child abuse.
The activists allegations echo broad claims Republican Texas officials and political candidates have made this year about the gender-affirming health care that transgender children receive assertions that medical experts say are false because doctors are not allowing children to go through with irreversible medical treatments.
The harassment experienced by healthcare providers trying to uphold their Hippocratic oath to save lives is heartbreaking, according to Ricardo Martinez, CEO of Equality Texas.
Accessing healthcare can be a courageous act for many LGBTQ+ people because of how difficult it is to find providers who are knowledgeable about our needs and the poor treatment we have experienced by insurers and/or providers in the past, Martinez said in a statement.
Officials at the childrens hospital and UT Southwestern Medical Center, which jointly operated the program, declined Friday to say what prompted them to stop GENECIS, other than to say it would benefit the patients and their families for privacy reasons. And they said in a statement Friday that current patients will continue to get the hormones and mental health treatments they were receiving before the program ended.
Pediatric endocrinology, psychiatry and adolescent and young adult care coordinated through this program are now managed and coordinated through each specialty department, the statement says. We do not anticipate any interruption of care or services for our existing patients who already receive care with these specialty teams.
Unlike the public fanfare that accompanied the programs opening in 2015, last Fridays closure of the program as it has operated came with no official announcement.
The choice to remove branding for this care offers a more private, insulated experience for patients and their families, the joint statement said.
References to the GENECIS program, which was under the umbrella of endocrinology at the childrens hospital, have been removed from the facilitys website.
Hospital officials said in the statement that new patients will be seen in appropriate specialty departments and offered mental health and counseling services.
We accept new patients for diagnosis, including evaluation of gender dysphoria, but will not initiate patients on hormone or puberty suppression therapy for only this diagnosis, the statement said.
Criticisms of the program came amid a wave of anti-transgender political sentiment in Texas. Lawmakers this year banned transgender student athletes from participating on the school sports teams that match their gender identity. That new law came after unsuccessful legislative attempts to ban treatments like those offered through GENECIS and define such health care as child abuse. Medical experts have pushed back on those portrayals. Leading health care organizations in Texas have said gender-affirming care is the best way to provide care to transgender children. That includes the use of puberty blockers, a type of medical treatment that delays puberty and is completely reversible. Such treatment has been approved for children for decades.
Gov. Greg Abbott earlier this year directed the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services to determine whether some gender confirmation surgeries for transgender children are child abuse. But medical experts say the surgeries Abbott cited orchiectomies, hysterectomies and mastectomies rarely, if ever, are part of gender affirming care for transgender children.
That request came after former state Sen. Don Huffines, who will challenge Abbott in next years Republican primary, criticized the governor for not doing enough to protect Texas children from mutilation.
But remember: The reason Republicans don't support things is messaging and not because they are literally plugging their ears and running with a narrative when LITERAL DOCTORS are calmly explaining what they have been doing for decades.
Not surprising. This is an issue where they think they've found an advantage and it's one of the last prejudices they can get away with openly expressing, on record.
They're pressing it it in legislation, in the courts, in school board meetings, and privately.
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I gotta be righteous, I gotta be me, I gotta be conscious, I gotta be free, I gotta be able, I gotta attack, I gotta be stable, I gotta be black.
But remember: The reason Republicans don't support things is messaging and not because they are literally plugging their ears and running with a narrative when LITERAL DOCTORS are calmly explaining what they have been doing for decades.
we have to placate them, otherwise, its us who are out of touch. Bill Maher said we have to be nice to transphobic people....and racists.....and nationalists....