A Texas family’s struggle to obtain medical care for their special needs child exemplifies the way anti-trans laws can hurt everybody, not just those who identify as something other than their sex assigned at birth.

Gabrielle Jones-Radtke, who has lived in El Paso her whole life, is now being forced to move to New Mexico so that her seven-year-old daughter, Freyja, can more easily receive the puberty blockers she needs to treat her Bardet-Biedl syndrome, a genetic disorder that has caused her to enter precocious puberty.

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Jones-Radtke told The Texas Tribune that her daughter’s pediatric endocrinologist, Dr. Hector Granados, the only person providing youth hormone care in all of El Paso, stopped prescribing puberty blockers after being sued by anti-trans Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) for allegedly violating the state’s gender-affirming care ban.

Granados was handed an injunction, banning him from prescribing the blockers to trans youth or from providing “false diagnoses, such as precocious puberty,” so that his patients could continue their care. The situation resulted in Granados stopping prescribing puberty blockers altogether.

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The case against Granados was ultimately dismissed, but Jones-Radtke doesn’t even know if he has resumed prescribing puberty blockers or not. She had already left his care due to the long wait times at his office, spurred by the lack of pediatric endocrinologists in the area.

“I think the passage, as well as the enforcement of [the gender-affirming care ban], is likely making it harder to attract pediatric endocrinologists to the region,” Granados’s attorney, Mark Bracken, told the Tribune. “We’ve made a lot of headway and improvement… attracting more specialists and more doctors. But there’s a long way to go.”

In short, doctors are scared and are even limiting themselves from offering hormone medications to cisgender kids for reasons unrelated to gender identity.

“I love Texas but right now, it doesn’t feel like they love us back,” Jones-Radtke said.

She added, “When you have a child with special needs, gray areas are not your friend, because your entire life is a gray area. Having something I can rely on is extremely paramount to her care, and if her doctors are too scared to do their job, what the heck am I supposed to do?”

The lack of pediatric endocrinologists in the area has also resulted in Freyja struggling to obtain another critical medication that helps control her overactive appetite caused by her disorder.

Without the medication Imcivree, Jones-Radtke said, the consequences can be “incredibly deadly,” causing issues with Freyja’s kidneys.

“We can’t get the care she needs, because all the endocrinologists are scared to do their jobs.”

Attorney General Paxton continues to enforce stricter laws against trans Texans. Last week, he declared that it is even illegal for mental health care providers licensed by the state to affirm trans youth and that doing so is child abuse.

Trans news site Transitics said Paxton’s opinion can be interpreted as essentially requiring mental health professionals to either refuse to see young trans patients or else engage in conversion therapy. The opinion states that therapists have an obligation to help children with “overcoming” an “underlying… condition,” which in this case is gender dysphoria.

Paxton has spent his tenure as attorney general terrorizing the trans community. In 2022, he issued a non-binding opinion calling gender-affirming health care a form of child abuse, which led Gov. Greg Abbott (R) to order the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services (DFPS) to investigate for child abuse any parents who allow their trans children to access gender-affirming medical care prescribed by their doctors.

In a post at the time, Paxton called gender affirming care and puberty blockers – which have been shown to reduce lifetime suicide risk for transgender people who have access to them before puberty – “monstrous and tragic.”

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