Exactly how much money does a human’s conscience cost? 

According to this campaign finance database, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Lt. Governor Dan Patrick and Rep. Dade Phelan have collectively received $2.47 million in campaign contributions from Border Health PAC and Friends of UT Southwestern Medical Center PAC since 2015. Both PACs are directly affiliated with pediatric gender modification centers.

In the 2022 election cycle alone, Abbott, Patrick and Phelan have collected a combined $400,000 from Border Health PAC, which is linked to the Doctors Hospital Renaissance (DHR). DHR Health provides gender modification for minors. 

Border Health PAC is the “influential legislative and policy-making arm” of DHR Health. Both Border Health PAC and DHR Health are controlled by powerful democratic financial bundler Alonzo Cantu. Cantu holds tremendous sway over policymakers, and according to Texas Monthly.

“Border Health has consistently ranked among the top ten most generous political action committees over the past decade, and though Cantu tends to lean toward Democrats… he isn’t shy about giving to Republicans who vote the way he wants. Last year, when Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick visited the Valley, the Senate had just shortchanged its funding for UT-Rio Grande Valley’s new medical school. After Patrick met with Cantu, most of that funding was restored. That’s power.”

DHR Health and its general partner, RGV Med, Inc., own and operate one of the largest physician-owned facilities in the United States. Border Health PAC’s stated mission is to “promote the issues of the medical profession along the border of Texas.” 

In a February 2021 interview with Alonzo Cantu by Edinburg Politics, Cantu said that Border Health PAC will “support the nomination and election of candidates that seek, through responsible means, to further the mission, goals and objectives of the medical health profession.”

“We learned throughout the process here that politicians listen to two things and two things only: money and votes. So, we were able to start the Border Health PAC where we raise a few million dollars a year, but we do not give any money unless people come down here and visit and realize we are not a third-world country,” Cantu said.

Abbott, Patrick, and Phelan also snagged $340,000 in the 2022 election cycle from Friends of UT Southwestern Medical Center PAC, also known as FOMCPAC, which is linked to Genecis Clinic. Genecis Clinic, which was formerly Children’s Health Dallas, is “the first and largest pediatric gender clinic in the Southwest.”

Genecis – which stands for Gender Education and Care, Interdisciplinary Support – was a “highly acclaimed seven-year-old program created by the hospitals to provide transgender and gender-diverse youth with health care, including mental health counseling and hormone therapy,” read a January 2022 article by The Dallas Morning News.

In November 2021, hospital officials reported that Genecis Clinic “was no longer accepting new patients for hormone or puberty suppression therapy to treat gender dysphoria. Health care for current Genecis patients is now managed and coordinated through different specialty departments at Children’s Health and UT Southwestern Medical Center.”

In addition, all references to Genecis Clinic were removed from the hospitals’ websites “to provide more security to these current patients.”

While hospital officials have refused to comment on the closure of Genecis, people speculate that this decision was made following public backlash toward the clinic, which provided puberty blockers, hormone replacement therapy and other gender-modifying chemicals to children. 

However, it’s worth noting that while Genecis made a theatrical public display of shutting its doors, a statement released to the media admits that the clinic is still fully operational; it’s just hidden from digital presence and cloaked under different names.

SB 1311 and Others: Dead at the Floor by the Hands of High-Ranking Republican Officeholders

Greg Abbott, Dan Patrick, and Dade Phelan ranked among the top expenditures of both Border Health PAC and FOMCPAC. These two-child gender modification linked PACs financed the largest portions of the three’s campaign funds, provoking speculation that these republican politicians have been bought.

Since October of 2019, “…several bills were filed in the Texas house in two separate sessions. In the 87th session, six bills were filed to end the gender modification of minors. Governor Abbott certainly had the opportunity to encourage the passage of any of these bills. They all died, an autopsy report by MadMommaBear can be found here,” an article earlier this month said. 

“Even with three special sessions that followed the regular session, the governor never added a bill to ban gender modification of minors to the call. So, what has the governor done? Governor Abbott wrote a letter. That seems to be his trademark move these days.”

“He wrote a letter to the Texas Department of Child and Family Protective services to ask for a determination from the agency on whether surgeries for the purpose of modifying a child’s gender were considered child abuse. The agency took months to respond that the surgeries were child abuse. No law has been passed.”

Blogger and political activist MadMommaBear said that republican officeholders Abbott, Patrick and Phelan are directly responsible for the death of several proposed bills to end the medical gender modification of minors. She details tactics they used below.

“We should be asking these top Republicans in Texas how much a child’s genitalia, future fertility and possibilities for natural sex in their adult lives means to them. It does appear that these top RINOs have a price. It has been a mystery all session long why Governor Abbott, who has hoodwinked much of the country into believing he is conservative, has not even mentioned the bills to ban gender modification in Texas. All the bills died in the hands of republicans in the House.”

“Speaker Phelan killed the final bill, SB1311, which had made it through the Senate and was awaiting a vote out of the House Public Health Committee, when Phelan recessed the House for three days right before the deadline for bills to be considered in the House. Four bills, there were six in all, died in the Public Health Committee chaired by Rep. Stephanie Klick, who was reported to have taken a donation from a PAC associated with the largest pediatric gender clinic in the Southwest, where children are chemically castrated,” MadMommaBear wrote.

Senate Bill 1311 was one of many failed attempts to restrict children’s exposure to gender-related chemical treatments. Under SB 1311, physicians who prescribe hormone therapy, puberty suppression treatment, or transition-related surgeries for the purpose of gender transitioning minors, defined as individuals under 18 years of age, could have their medical license revoked and would not be covered under liability insurance. 

Tracy Shannon, the director of the Texas Mass Resistance activist group, also supports the notion that Phelan’s decision to declare a recess effectively killed SB 1311’s chances of passing. 

Lt. Governor Dan Patrick

In a conversation with National File, former U.S. House candidate Chris Ekstrom, who is deeply invested in the protection of children from transgender-related hormone treatments and surgeries, speaks on Lt. Governor Dan Patrick’s involvement. 

“Ekstrom suggested that Patrick allowed SB 1311 to pass in the Senate under the presumption that it would be killed by Phelan in the House. 

‘I wish I could say I’m surprised that Dan Patrick is taking money from the chemical castration lobby. But during the last session, to my horror, I realized that Dan Patrick was totally unaware of the Monuments Protection Act until we forced him at a meeting of the True Texas Project to acknowledge that Republicans expected him to do something about it,’ said Ekstrom.

‘After the meeting, he promptly pushed it through the Senate, where it died in the House, just like SB 1311. Is this Deja vu? $120,000 isn’t chump change, and apparently Dan knew which way the wind was blowing in the house.’” 

In addition to grabbing child gender-modification linked PAC donations, Texas Rep. Stephanie Klick, who is mentioned in MadMommaBear’s report, also received $20,100 directly from Dade Phelan.

 

Stephanie Klick

Gov. Greg Abbott faces scrutiny among right-leaning voters for his inaction in restricting transition-related medical treatment for minors in Texas. According to an article by Texas Tribune, after the senate bill failed to pass, Abbott claimed that he was working on a different bill that would have the same effect. 

Yet “…the interviewer, Mark Davis, asked Abbott why he did not add the issue to his agenda for the special session that began earlier this month. Abbott blamed the lower chamber, saying the ‘chances of that passing during the session in the House of Representatives was nil.’” 

Despite pressure from concerned Texans to include a new child gender-transition halting proposal in his special session agenda, Abbott chose to remain silent.

A national upsurge in the number of children and teenagers requesting puberty blockers, hormone replacement therapies, and gender modification related surgeries has polarized the political, medical and public spheres alike. A recent study by researchers in Pittsburgh cites that as many as one in 10 ten U.S. high-schoolers identify as “gender-diverse,” which the study defines as transgender, nonbinary, or gender-queer.

Puberty Blockers, Cross-Sex Hormones and Sexual Reassignment Surgeries are Medical Child Abuse

This growing phenomenon is highly debated in the medical community, in which doctors have to decide when and after what specific criteria to provide these gender-altering treatments – particularly for teenagers and pre-pubescent children. 

A silenced portion of medical professionals argue that the debate shouldn’t focus on when and how to provide life-altering chemicals and procedures to minors, but on if this should be a practice at all.

Culture of Life Foundation breaks down a few key arguments against medically transitioning children:

“The argument can alternatively be made that it is abusive and neglectful to accede to a youth’s feelings about their identity and expose them to interventions which will delay their adjustment to their biological sex, which is the only identity in which they will flourish.

“First, the research is clear that people who identify as transgender are 10 times as likely to attempt suicide at some point in their lives, and this rate almost doubles among those who have had transition surgery. Consequently, the notion that affirming transgender feelings by providing pharmacological interventions is damaging to the young person, not only psychologically, but physically as well,” Culture of Life Foundation said.

“Puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones are known to place these adolescents at a greater risk for bone density problems, cancer, metabolic abnormalities, and impaired fertility. Another consistent finding that calls into question the practice of intervening with hormones for children who are in critical stages of their natural development is that the vast majority of those who identify as transgender do not persist in this identification.”

Therefore, the administration of gender-transitioning hormones to youth… “might interfere with a healing process that would naturally occur, or at least delay a person’s realization that changing the gender by which they are living will not be a panacea for the burdens that they experience,” Culture of Life Foundation reported.

Michelle Cretella, M.D., who was the executive director of the American College of Pediatricians, explained in a 2016 peer-reviewed article that medical professionals “who dare to question the unscientific party line of supporting gender transition therapy will find themselves maligned and out of a job.”

In a July 2017 article on The Daily Signal, Cretella described herself as intimately familiar with the pediatric and behavioral health communities and their practices. She served 17 years as a board-certified general pediatrician with a focus in child behavioral health, and is a mother of four.

“For the last 12 years, I have been a board member and researcher for the American College of Pediatricians, and for the last three years I have served as its president,” Cretella said. 

“I have witnessed an upending of the medical consensus on the nature of gender identity. What doctors once treated as a mental illness, the medical community now largely affirms and even promotes as normal. Pediatric ‘gender clinics’ are considered elite centers for affirming children who are distressed by their biological sex. This distressful condition, once dubbed gender identity disorder, was renamed ‘gender dysphoria’ in 2013.”

Transgender ideology is not just infecting our laws, Cretella said. “It is intruding into the lives of the most innocent among us, children, and with the apparent growing support of the professional medical community.”

“The transition-affirming view holds that children who ‘consistently and persistently insist’ that they are not the gender associated with their biological sex are innately transgender… In normal life and in psychiatry, anyone who ‘consistently and persistently insists’ on anything else contrary to physical reality is considered either confused or delusional.”

The transition-affirming protocol among the medical community tells parents to treat their children as the gender they desire, and to place them on puberty blockers around age 11 or 12, Cretella said. If by age 16, the children still insist that they’re still “trapped in the wrong body,” they are placed on hormone replacement therapy, and biological females may obtain a double mastectomy. 

Genital reassignment surgeries, Cretella says, are not recommended before age 18, although some surgeons have recently argued against this restriction.

“The transition-affirming approach has been embraced by public institutions in media, education and our legal system, and is now recommended by most national medical organizations. The transgender movement has gained legs in the medical community and in our culture by offering a deeply flawed narrative. The scientific research and facts tell a different story,” Cretella said.

Michelle Cretella, M.D., then analyzes the scientific evidence that disputes medically transitioning children.

“Identical twins contain 100 percent of the same DNA from conception and are exposed to the same prenatal hormones. So, if genes and/or prenatal hormones contributed significantly to transgenderism, we should expect both twins to identify as transgender close to 100 percent of the time.”

Yet in the largest study of twin transgender adults, only 28 percent of identical twins both identified as transgender, Cretella said. 

“That 28 percent of identical twins both identified as transgender suggests a minimal biological predisposition, which means transgenderism will not manifest itself without nonbiological factors also impacting the individual during his lifetime. Studies like this one prove that the belief in ‘innate gender identity’ – the idea that ‘feminized’ or ‘masculinized’ brains can be trapped in the wrong body from before birth – is a myth that has no basis in science,” Cretella said.

The American Psychological Association’s Handbook of Sexuality and Psychology admits that “prior to the widespread promotion of transition affirmation, 75 to 95 percent of pre-pubertal children who were distressed by their biological sex eventually outgrew that distress. The vast majority came to accept their biological sex by late adolescence after passing naturally through puberty,” Cretella said.

Furthermore, puberty blockers for “gender dysphoria” have not been proven safe, Cretella said. Puberty blockers were originally studied and found safe for “the treatment of a medical disorder in children called precocious puberty, caused by the abnormal and unhealthy early secretion of a child’s pubertal hormones. 

However, as a groundbreaking paper in The New Atlantis points out, we cannot infer from these studies whether or not these blockers are safe in physiologically normal children with gender dysphoria,” Cretella said.

As cited by Culture of Life Foundation, the authors of this paper note evidence for decreased bone mineralization, which indicates an increased risk of bone fractures as young adults. The paper also analyzes increased risks of obesity and testicular cancer in boys, and an unknown impact upon psychological and cognitive development. 

Furthermore, “…while we currently don’t have any extensive, long-term studies of children placed on blockers for gender dysphoria, studies conducted on adults from the past decade give us cause for concern,” said Cretella. 

Cretella referenced 2006 and 2007 articles in the journal Psychneuroendocrinology, which “reported brain abnormalities in the area of memory and executive functioning among adult women who received blockers for gynecologic reasons. Similarly, many studies of men treated for prostate cancer with blockers also suggest the possibility of significant cognitive decline.” 

Cretella then emphasized several other medical concerns for “gender-affirming” medical practices on youth, including the lack of scientific literature of gender-dysphoric children discontinuing blockers; dangerous health risks associated with cross-sex hormones; and neuroscientific evidence that adolescents lack the adult capacity needed for risk assessment. You can read her full article here. 

“Advocates of the transition-affirming protocol allege that suicide is the direct and inevitable consequence of withholding social affirmation and biological alterations from a gender-dysphoric child. In other words, those who do not endorse the transition-affirming protocol are essentially condemning gender-dysphoric children to suicide,” Cretella said. 

“Yet as noted earlier, prior to the widespread promotion of transition affirmation, 75 to 95 percent of gender-dysphoric youth ended up happy with their biological sex after simply passing through puberty. 

“In addition, contrary to the claim of activists, there is no evidence that harassment and discrimination, let alone lack of affirmation, are the primary cause of suicide among any minority group. In fact, at least one study from 2008 found perceived discrimination by LGBT-identified individuals not to be causative,” Cretella said. 

In fact, adults who undergo sexual reassignment surgeries, “…even in Sweden, which is among the most LGBT-affirming counties, have a suicide rate nearly 20 times greater than that of the general population. Clearly, sex reassignment is not the solution to gender dysphoria,” Cretella said.

What Should Happen from Here?

Children are every society’s most valuable and vulnerable population. The crux of the matter is that while the “transgender-affirming” movement purports to help children, it is inflicting grave, long-term physical and psychological damage on them. More frighteningly, we’ve yet to see every final repercussion of these new, so-called “gender treatments.”

Medical professionals, activist groups and the mass media have infiltrated the public sector using the myth that people are born transgender to justify wide-scale, uncontrolled and unpredictable experimentation on children. These children, who range from experiencing normal self-questioning to children with psychological conditions, serve as medical lab rats.

The “chemical castration” lobbies, including FOMCPAC and Border Health PAC, fund and support child gender clinics and own the votes of countless lawmakers and politicians on both sides of the party line. Officeholders who accept money from these PACs and vote (or slow-walk bills) on their behaves are engaging in nothing less than institutionalized child abuse. 

It is time for our nation’s leaders and health professionals to open their eyes, learn exactly what is happening to our children, and put an end to promoting gender ideologies through media, school curriculum and legislative policies. This election cycle, we must unite to take action.

What Can be Done?

In this election cycles, we do have choices. There are outstanding candidates who are strongly opposed to these practices and will put a stop to them in Texas. Katy Christian Magazine has produced a Christian Voter’s Guide which can be found here.