Sharon McCutcheon for Unsplash.

A Dallas County court has issued a temporary restraining order authorizing physicians at Children’s Medical Center to resume providing gender-affirming care, including hormone treatment and puberty blockers, for transgender youth who were previously treated at the GENECIS clinic.

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The ruling comes as part of a legal case the clinic’s founder, Dr. Ximena Lopez, filed against Children’s Health of Dallas.

Lopez’s attorney, Charla Aldous of Aldous\Walker in Dallas, says his client never wanted to sue anyone, “But UT Southwestern and others put up roadblocks to keep us from finding out the truth about who closed down GENECIS. That’s fine. We’ll do this another way and in the process, we’ll take care of kids who need this treatment.”

Former Advocate reporter Emily Toman interviewed Lopez back in 2015, shortly after she founded GENECIS, when she was working with a student from Woodrow Wilson High School who was a patient.

The need for a transgender program at Children’s comes down to life and death, Lopez told the Advocate. The rate of suicide attempts among children with gender dysphoria is 60%, according to TransPulse, an Ontario-based research group that studied youth aged 16 to 24 who did not have parental support.

Even parents who reject the transgender notion have sought Lopez’s help after realizing that their child could die from this.

“Once it happens to their child, it’s a very powerful thing,” she said at the time. Read the full story in our April 2015 magazine here.

Not everyone agrees. Amid criticism of gender-affirming therapy from conservative politicians, UT Southwestern and Children’s shut down the GENECIS clinic in the fall of 2021. Lopez and others at the clinic were told they could only treat existing patients and that they could not provide any gender-affirming care to new ones.

“The hospital and UT Southwestern were very proud of this program and they should be,” Dr. Lopez says. “But all of that changed when this became a political issue rather than a medical one. I’ve seen patients across all sectors of society from families conservative, liberal and everything in between. They need this care.”