Updated at 8:30 p.m. with a statement from the hospitals.
About 850 doctors, medical students and employees at two Dallas hospitals have signed a petition opposing the decision to shutter a program for transgender youth to future patients.
The petition, which was submitted to leadership at UT Southwestern and Children’s Medical Center on Friday, represents growing vocal opposition in and outside the institutions over their decision last year to abruptly cut off new patient access to the gender-affirming care provided through the program.
Hundreds of family members also signed a letter decrying the effect of the changes on their loved ones, and, earlier this month, the program’s top doctor took the hospitals to court.
The petition and letter come as state leaders, including the attorney general and governor, have classified gender-affirming care for minors as abuse and required those who provide it to be investigated. Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston cut off care to trans youth altogether in response.
The petition says changes at the program, known as Genecis, violate doctors’ promise to promote “health and a healthy society” as health professionals. Its signatories also raise concerns that there was outside pressure to stop taking new patients into the program, which the petition says could hurt trans youth who rely on treatments like puberty blockers and hormone therapy.
“In the same way that gender-affirming care saves lives, a lack of access or undue barriers to gender-affirming care causes real harm,” the petition reads, according to a copy obtained by The Dallas Morning News. The signatories came from dozens of specialties, with about 200 working with children in the pediatric fields.
Genecis, the only program created specifically to provide gender-affirming care to minors in the region, operated largely without issue for seven years. But in November, the hospitals removed all references to the program online and began referring new patients seeking certain treatments, like puberty blockers and hormone therapy, elsewhere.
UT Southwestern and Children’s initially said that dissolution of the program’s branding was done to provide existing patients and their families with more privacy.
Then this month, UT Southwestern said it also considered nonmedical factors — such as media attention and scientific and political controversy surrounding gender-affirming care for trans youth — when it made the changes at Genecis. The Human Rights Campaign, a national LGBTQ rights organization, significantly lowered the once highly rated institutions’ scores on its health care equality index as a result.
UT Southwestern and Children’s issued a joint statement Monday evening reiterating that care for existing patients is unchanged. New patients continue to get psychiatric care and are referred to outside providers not affiliated with the hospitals for other medical treatments, they said.
The hospitals said the Genecis brand became a “lightening rod for controversy” last year, which prompted changes to avoid shutting down the program entirely.
All of the major state and national medical groups support individualized, age-appropriate medical treatments for transgender minors.
Myriam Reynolds, the mother of a Genecis patient, said more than 400 family members signed the letter sent to hospital leadership on behalf of their trans children and loved ones.
“We fear that if GENECIS ceases to exist, there would be nowhere for us to go. The type of care offered at GENECIS does not exist anywhere else in Texas. As it is, some of us drive hundreds of miles for this care,” they wrote, according to a copy of the letter The News obtained.
They requested the program be restored for new patients.
Reynolds said her 16-year-old son, who has been a patient at Genecis since 2017, needs this care.
“The care that my child receives there is life-saving. It is the most important medical care my child receives and has ever received,” Reynolds told The News.
