Second Texas doctor sued for providing gender-affirming care to minors

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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing a second doctor for allegedly violating state law and providing gender-affirming medical care to minors.

Dr. Hector Granados is an El Paso pediatric endocrinologist. Paxton accuses him in the lawsuit of prescribing puberty blockers and hormone therapy to more than 20 minors to treat gender dysphoria, or the distress someone can feel when their gender identity doesn’t match their physical appearance.

In 2023, Texas passed Senate Bill 14, which prohibited medical providers from prescribing certain gender-affirming treatments, including puberty blockers and hormones, to minors to assist them to medically transition.

Earlier this month, Paxton filed a similar lawsuit against Dr. May Lau, an adolescent medicine physician and associate professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. The lawsuits say these doctors are “radical gender activists” who are circumventing the law. Both suits seek financial penalties as well as the revocation of the doctors’ medical licenses.

“Granados’s practices, publications, and presentations reveal an entrenched commitment to a gender ideology that desires to medically transition the biological sex of children or affirm the belief that a child’s gender identity is inconsistent with their biological sex,” Paxton wrote in the lawsuit filed Tuesday.

Granados did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The lawsuit alleges Granados violated SB 14, but also says he engaged in fraud by continuing to provide patients with puberty blockers for gender transition while claiming in medical records that the treatment is necessary for precocious puberty, or the early onset of sexual development.

The minors Granados is accused of treating are between the ages of 12 and 17, with the majority 15 or older.

In August 2015, Granados helped open El Paso’s first clinic treating transgender children and teens through Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center. At the time, the clinic was lauded as filling a necessary gap in the region.

“There’s a huge need for the care of trans youths, there’s very little physicians or few who have been trained to do so,” Granados told the Texas Tech student newspaper at the time. “It was very important for me to open this and we’ve seen great results.”

Granados now works in private practice, according to his website. He was an assistant professor at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso medical school until 2019. The university did not respond to a request for comment.

While Granados practices in El Paso County, the lawsuit was filed in Kaufman County, southeast of Dallas, where one of the 21 patients listed in the lawsuit lives.

Disclosure: Texas Tech University, Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center and Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center El Paso have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.