AUSTIN, Texas (LifeSiteNews) – Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton launched an investigation this week into two pharmaceutical companies accused of promoting hormone blocking drugs for children with gender dysphoria despite the drugs never having been approved for that use.
“The manufacture, sale, prescription, and use of puberty blockers on young teens and minors is dangerous and reckless,” Paxton said Monday in a press release. “These drugs were approved for very different purposes and can have detrimental and even irreversible side effects. I will not allow pharmaceutical companies to take advantage of Texas children.”
“Puberty blockers used on minors experiencing gender dysphoria or similar mental disorders is child abuse,” he told Fox News. “Doctors, parents, guardians, and counselors who aid and abet the use of puberty blockers in an improper manner are complicit in the abuse. As are prescription drug manufacturers, which is the basis of my investigation.”
Texas Attorney General @KenPaxtonTX is launching an investigation into pharmaceutical companies allegedly advertising and promoting hormone puberty blockers for children without disclosing the potential risks.
Thank you for leading on this issue.https://t.co/rg3aIsGQr6
— American Principles 🇺🇸 (@approject) December 14, 2021
Paxton’s probe investigates Endo Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and AbbVie, Inc. for possible violations of the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, which prohibits false, misleading, and deceptive business practices. The two companies are accused of advertising and promoting puberty blocking drugs for “unapproved uses and without disclosing the potential risks associated with these drugs to children and their parents,” the attorney general’s office said.
The drugs include Supprelin LA and Lupron Depot, which the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved to treat central precocious puberty (CPP), as well as Vantas and other forms of Lupron, which are approved as palliative treatments for prostrate cancer.
Those hormone blockers are now being prescribed off-label for gender dysphoria in minors, however. The FDA has not approved any medications for gender dysphoria and no drugs or surgeries have ever been evaluated in long-term clinical studies with gender-confused minors.
Puberty blockers are also linked to a host of serious, permanent side effects. Temporary Lupron use may lead to “osteoporosis, mood disorders, seizures, cognitive impairment and, when combined with cross-sex hormones, sterility,” according to the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds).
Supprelin can also cause psychiatric problems, and Vantas is associated with osteoporosis, kidney problems, and liver damage, among other things.
Dr. Quentin Van Meter, president of ACPeds, told LifeSiteNews he fully agrees with Paxton that giving puberty blockers to children for gender dysphoria is child abuse.
“[I]t is taking a very healthy, intentionally designed part of life where a child goes from being a non-reproductive individual to becoming a reproductive individual in a time frame and an age frame where the physiology is there to change the physical body, in terms of bone structure, in terms of organ structure, in terms of brain maturation,” Dr. Van Meter said.
“If you interrupt that, you are basically setting up a disease state,” he said. “And then on top of that, the purpose is clearly, in the vast majority of kids that get on puberty blockers, they will not be allowed to go through their own natural puberty.”
“This is one large experiment on American children.”
Up to 97.8 percent of boys and 88 percent of girls with gender dysphoria accept their biological sex by adulthood, according to the American Psychiatric Association (APA). But virtually all of those given puberty blockers end up on cross-sex hormones, which often sterilize users for life and typically lead to mutilating transgender surgeries.
Endo Pharmaceuticals has denied promoting hormone drugs for gender dysphoria, according to Fox News, but Dr. Van Meter said he thinks Paxton’s investigation is appropriate.
“I think there is clearly discussion the companies are seeing their product being used off-label,” Dr. Van Meter said. “They are not coming up with negative comments saying this is inappropriate, we don’t condone this. They’re just being very quiet.”
Lupron, one of AbbVie’s top products, made the company more than $1.1 billion last year, up from $829 million in 2017. Sales of Endo’s Supprelin topped $88 million in 2020.
Save Texas Kids, a group that works to ban destructive transgender procedures for children, estimates that hundreds of kids have been “pushed or duped” into taking puberty blockers at just one Dallas gender program run by Children’s Medical Center. The program, known as GENECIS, shut down in November after months of protests and multiple attempts this year by Texas lawmakers to outlaw transgender drugs and surgeries for minors.
James Younger, a nine-year-old boy whose mother is attempting to have him undergo “gender transitioning,” was reportedly “counseled” at GENECIS.
Paxton’s investigation into Endo and AbbVie comes after the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services declared in August, following a review ordered by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, that genital amputation surgeries constitute child abuse under Texas law.
Arkansas and Tennessee have also taken action to restrict hormone blocking drugs and “sex change” surgeries for children and adolescents this year.