As the years-long fight to protect Texas children continues, top state officials—including Gov. Greg Abbott—continue to allow medical practitioners to perform disfiguring gender operations on minors.
According to their website, the publicly funded University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center—which is overseen by the Abbott-appointed UT Board of Regents—is involved in the controversial GENECIS program at the Children’s Medical Center in Dallas.
Currently in Texas, medical professionals are permitted to perform “transgender” experiments on children, such as cutting off their healthy body parts or giving them sterilizing cross-sex hormones and puberty blocker drugs.
The UT Southwestern-led GENECIS program is one of those clinics, and while it doesn’t offer physical castration, it does provide chemical castration.
The overall issue in Texas drew an international spotlight several years ago with the child abuse case of James Younger, a 9-year-old Dallas-area boy whose mother told him he was a girl and wanted to force him—against his father’s wishes—to take such drugs and eventually be castrated. James’ mother explored operations offered by the GENECIS program.
UT Southwestern’s Pediatric Endocrinology Department not only “provides services” to the program, but one of its faculty members (Dr. Ximena Lopez) actually directs it.
“In 2020, the [Pediatric Endocrinology] Division’s attending physicians performed 12,441 outpatient and virtual visits and supervised ~6,500 visits by non-physician providers,” read the most recent UT Southwestern annual report on the GENECIS program.
While UT Southwestern practitioners engage in such experiments on children, the UT Board of Regents remains silent.
In late November, citizen activist Adam Cahn sent an open records request to the regents for “all communication [between the regents and any representative of UT Southwestern or Children’s Medical] … regarding the ‘GENECIS’ program over the past six months.” This week, the regents’ office replied they did not find any.
“I don’t know whether they’re lying or if the board is just doing zero oversight,” Cahn said. “Either one is plausible. Neither is good.”
On Wednesday, Texas Scorecard also sent an inquiry to the Board of Regents, asking if it was aware its UT Southwestern organization was engaging in this program. The board did not reply.
Meanwhile, Texas Scorecard chronicled the overall child mutilation issue throughout 2020, a saga that involved nearly 2 million Republican primary voters voting to ban the barbaric medical practices, and Gov. Abbott and the Republican-controlled state Legislature repeatedly refusing to outlaw the operations.
Additionally, in November, UT Southwestern quietly ended the public branding for the GENECIS program, instead choosing to continue the work in the shadows of its various pediatric departments.
“The choice to remove branding for this care offers a more private, insulated experience for patients and their families,” UT Southwestern and Children’s Medical officials said in a joint statement.
“Our children are being targeted by a radical, extreme agenda that seeks to confuse them at best and at worst, sterilize and mutilate their bodies during critical periods of normal development,” said Jill Glover, committee chairwoman for the Republican Party of Texas. “This is medical tyranny and child abuse in the worst way possible, and we must stop it to save Texas children.”
