The Texas Court Trying to Intimidate a New York Hospital
The current administration did not invent these intimidation tactics. Before Texas lawmakers outright banned gender-affirming care for minors in 2023, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was experimenting with various legal threats against providers and parents intended to accomplish what a ban would do, or worse. He unilaterally deemed gender-affirming care for minors “abuse” (three years before Robert F. Kennedy’s similar executive order in December 2025 broadly defining such care as dangerous) and ordered state agencies to investigate parents of trans children if they helped their own children access care. He opened investigations into two Texas hospitals, claiming they were violating unspecified state laws and demanding they turn over the same types of records that are currently required of NYU Langone. By the time gender-affirming care was banned in Texas, it was already almost impossible to access. Some Texas families I met in 2021 as they lobbied against the ban and other anti-trans laws had already arranged for out-of-state care, or had left the state altogether.
But for officials seeking to end gender-affirming care in Texas, the state’s ban wasn’t enough. Paxton began filing lawsuits against individual providers who allegedly continued to offer gender-affirming care to minors, referring in court filings to one provider as “a mocker who endangers the health and safety of minors” and another as “a radical gender activist.” This week, Paxton, now a Trump-endorsed candidate for John Cornyn’s Senate seat, and the DOJ announced their latest victory in such efforts: They forced Texas’ largest children’s hospital to create a so-called “detransition” clinic that, as Paxton puts it, “will help provide free care to those who have been victims of a twisted and morally bankrupt transgender ideology.” The hospital must also pay $10 million in fines and damages and revoke the medical privileges of five doctors.
In the case of NYU Langone, we are seeing a number of extreme and lawless trends: providers and patients being intimidated by the malicious collection of private health care information; and states attempt to apply their bans on stigmatized health care to states that have no such bans – which, in fact, have protective laws intended to ensure patient rights and access.
