Texas is suing a “radical gender” doctor whom the state alleges perpetrated medical fraud and attempted to subvert state law pertaining to gender treatments for minors.
Children’s Health System of Texas and Dr. Jason Jarin unlawfully provided minors sex-rejecting medications, including puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, defrauded state insurance programs, and skirted state law, according to allegations in a lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
“I will use every legal tool available to ensure radical gender activists like Jarin face justice for hurting our kids,” Paxton told The Daily Wire. “This criminal extremist not only permanently harmed children, but he also then defrauded Medicaid and stuck Texas taxpayers with the bill for this insanity. Experimental ‘transition’ procedures on minors are illegal, unethical, and will not be tolerated in Texas.”
In June 2023, Texas passed Senate Bill 14, which banned sex-rejecting interventions for minors. Dr. Jarin, a Division Director at Children’s Health System of Texas and Associate Professor at UT Southwestern Medical Center, continued to provide children cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers after the law went into effect on September 1, 2023, the lawsuit alleges.
Dr. Jarin billed males for birth control medications that were intended to serve as cross-sex estrogen, fraudulently used diagnostic codes when billing for sex-rejecting procedures, and gave puberty blockers to “otherwise healthy children under the guise of ‘precocious puberty,’” according to the lawsuit.
Puberty blockers, which can cost thousands of dollars, are approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the treatment of precocious puberty, an endocrine disorder in which early sexual development occurs in children. They are not FDA-approved for the treatment of gender dysphoria.
“Although Texas law bans dangerous and experimental sex-rejecting procedures on children, the scourge of so-called ‘gender affirming care’ persists in the State of Texas,” the lawsuit reads. “Even worse, Texas taxpayers have been on the hook for millions of dollars in gender transition surgeries, hormones, and other procedures that turn otherwise healthy children and young adults into chronic medical patients.”
“Our top priority is the health and well-being of the patients and families we serve. We comply with all applicable local, state and federal health care law,” Children’s Health said in a statement.
“Due to ongoing legal proceedings, we are unable to comment further at this time.”
In 2015, Children’s and UT Southwestern jointly opened a gender clinic, called the GENder Education and Care, Interdisciplinary Support clinic (GENECIS), which had more than 1,000 patients before abruptly closing in March 2022 after facing “intense scrutiny” as the public became more aware of the horrors of gender medicine, the lawsuit describes.
However, despite the public-facing closure of the gender clinic, healthcare providers continued to provide sex-rejecting procedures to children through the Adolescent and Young Adult clinics at Children’s and the Department of Pediatric Gynecology.
“Most patients continued to see the same providers at the same locations, and the partnership between UT Southwestern and Children’s remained essentially the same,” states the lawsuit.
Both the GENECIS and Adolescent and Young Adult clinics were “overseen by overlapping department chairs at UT Southwestern,” which included the Department of Pediatrics chair, Dr. Jorge Bezerra, Department of Pediatric Endocrinology chair, Dr. Perrin White, and the Division of Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics chair, Dr. Richard Adams, the lawsuit describes.
When SB-14 went into effect, Dr. Jarin and two former GENECIS clinic doctors, Dr. Brett Cooper and Dr. Mary Lau, met with UT Southwestern leadership, including Bezerra, White, and Adams, to “discuss the implication of SB-14 for both institutions,” according to the lawsuit.
Dr. Jarin was primarily tasked, alongside White, Lau, and Cooper, with creating a “wean protocol” that allowed patients to wean off of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones in compliance with SB-14 over a “medically appropriate” period of time, according to the lawsuit. Patients who attended mental health sessions and were prescribed the medications before June 1, 2023, were eligible for the “wean protocol.”
Paxton claims this protocol was an attempt to subvert compliance with SB-14 and “justify the continued, illegal prescription of cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers to children,” in the lawsuit.
The “wean protocol” decreased the dosing of sex-rejecting hormones at such a low rate that it would take “2 to 5 years to wean completely off,” allowing children to maintain the feminizing or masculinizing effects of the drugs until age 18, when they could legally return to their “pre-SB-14 dosage,” according to the lawsuit.
Furthermore, if patients met either of two “exception” criteria, they were permitted to discontinue weaning altogether.
The protocol required patients to maintain the reproductive hormone levels of the opposite sex “in perpetuity,” claiming this was necessary to protect their bone health.
If patients failed to maintain these artificially high hormone levels, which are the intended result of cross-sex hormone therapy, they were granted an “exception” from weaning off of the outlawed drugs, according to the lawsuit.
Paxton said “there was no legitimate medical basis for their recommendation regarding bone health,” and the protocol was “always a pretext for patients to continue illegal cross-sex hormones,” as stated in the lawsuit.
“There is no evidence to justify maintaining these hormone levels over prolonged periods of time. The vast medical literature on this topic shows that these hormonal treatments did not produce the desired effect of improving psychological well-being,” Do No Harm chairman Dr. Stanley Goldfarb told The Daily Wire. “Moreover, they are involved with all of the unfortunate side effects, including the potential for sterility as well as a number of genital problems associated with prolonged exposure to contra-sex hormones.”
Patients were also granted an exception from weaning off cross-sex hormones if their mental health team failed to document their “mental health stability at least every six months,” according to the lawsuit.
The same initial intake criteria used by UT Southwestern and Children’s to begin medicalizing gender confused children was used to continue cross-sex hormone therapy under the wean protocol, according to the lawsuit.
The 75-page lawsuit outlined multiple allegations of billing fraud and the subversion of SB-14, providing examples from multiple patients.
In the lawsuit, Texas claims both defendants violated the Texas Health Care Program Fraud Prevention Act and the Texas Business & Commerce Code. It also claims Dr. Jarin “knowingly” violated SB-14 “with respect to at least twelve minor patients.”
“Jarin and Children’s conspired to subvert compliance with SB-14 and to receive reimbursement for gender interventions in violation of State law. Defendants conspired to violate SB-14 and therefore receive reimbursement from Texas Medicaid in violation of State law and regulation,” states the lawsuit.
The federal government has not stated an intention to get involved in the Texas situation, but allegations of Medicaid fraud could draw interest from the Department of Justice.
