Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has insisted that the ban on “gender transitioning” children applies to mental health care providers as well as other medical professionals.
S.B.14 makes it illegal to convince children that they can alter their biological sex and identify as the opposite sex in the state. But Paxton has now clarified that this certainly applies to mental healthcare professionals who are licensed under the Texas Behavioral Health Executive Council. As legally licensed healthcare providers, the attorney general stated, mental health professionals cannot expect to be held exempt from the prohibition on transing children.
Paxton said in a March 2 press release, “Any radical facilitating the ‘transitioning’ of our kids is committing child abuse. The law is clear that these radical procedures are illegal, and in no world should Texans’ tax dollars be used to permanently harm children.” This is an important point: Mental health professionals who receive taxpayer money should not be enforcing radical gender ideology on children.
Paxton added, “This opinion should send a clear warning there will be consequences for any medical professional, whether a doctor or a therapist, who is illegally ‘transitioning’ Texas kids.”
While mental health providers do not give minors the so-called “transgender interventions” themselves, these same providers do facilitate and encourage the “interventions.”
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As Paxton’s release explained, children with gender dysphoria or children who are eventually convinced that they should have gender dysphoria often receive confirmation of that mental illness or encouragement to indulge it from mental health providers. The path to trans insanity might end with double mastectomies and surgical castration, but it often starts with a woke therapist or psychologist.
Paxton’s new opinion summary sums it up:
Any licensee that facilitates the provision of unlawful procedures or treatments that aim to transition a child’s sex are thus forbidden from receiving public money in support of those efforts and, separately, risk revocation of their licenses to practice.
Paxton is aggressively pursuing at the state level what the Trump administration is pursuing at the federal level against the damaging “treatments” that HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. rightly calls “sex-rejecting.”
HHS found in a 2025 peer-reviewed study, titled “Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices,” that “long-term health risks such as infertility” are tragically often the result of the “overmedicalization of children.”
Notably, in January, detransitioner Fox Varian won a $2 million lawsuit against her psychologist and surgeon after she accused them of medical malpractice for transitioning her and permanently damaging her body and her life. Hopefully, we will see many more such lawsuits in the future, and if so, the woke doctors and psychologists and nurses and therapists who have encouraged children’s gender dysphoria will face much-deserved justice.
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