The Texas Child Mental Health Consortium (TCMHCC) was funded in 2019 by the Republican-dominated Texas Legislature with an initial taxpayer-funded investment of $90 million. In the 87th Texas Legislative Session, the consortium was allocated $113 million. Since it launched in 2020, the consortium has provided 13,309 students mental health services with a total of 35,700 visits via telehealth. That amounts to $5686 per visit and roughly $15,252 per student with an average number of visits of 2.68 per student.
If that sounds like a lot to you it is because it is. The average cost for therapy in Texas ranges between $60 to $250 per hour. The TCMHCC is comprised of several teams from Texas universities and medical schools. Included in the consortium is the University of Texas Health Science Center at Tyler. On February 21, 2023, the following universities petitioned the Texas House Appropriations Subcommittee for Article 3 spending. University of Texas Health Science Center – Tyler was among those present.
MadMommaBear was present to hear all of the pleas for taxpayer money being made at the committee hearing. She made a statement about a few of the Universities being involved in pediatric gender modification. In the video below the Texas Director for MassResistance testifies that some of the institutions that requested money of the legislature have been or are currently involved in pediatric gender modification. Specifically mentioned are UTMB Galveston, Texas Tech Health Science Center – El Paso, and UT Southwestern.
If, like State Rep John Bryant, you don’t grasp the reality of the situation in Texas with children having surgeries and other “gender-affirming care”, then you can view some evidence here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Did the state legislature do any investigation into the medical ethics of the institutions before appropriating the money for the last two sessions? Texas Tech HSC opened a pediatric gender clinic in El Paso in 2015 and UTSW also had a pediatric gender clinic that was known to the public. At the time the legislature rewarded the money (2019) this information was readily available and the issue of transitioning minors was already making national news. Texas was in the spotlight with the case of James Younger capturing the nation’s attention. Even Governor Greg Abbott tweeted about it.
Despite the tweet from the Governor’s Office and four years of escalating concerns over pediatric gender modification, there have been no meaningful efforts to stop pediatric gender modification in Texas. Even worse, it appears that the cancer of gender ideology and its poisonous sister “gender-affirming care” are fueled by taxpayer dollars. Taxpayer-funded universities and medical schools are training primary care physicians and mental health providers on how to provide “gender-affirming care” to minors.
University of Texas Southwestern has made national headlines for its gender clinic for children. The media widely reported that their clinic had closed. A statement that was later released by UTSW and Children’s Hospital clarified that they were still providing the services.
The University of Texas Health Science Center -Tyler which is part of the Texas Child Mental Health Care Consortium (CMHCC) conducted training with a woke Assistance Professor of Medicine all about gender identities and providing details on how the providers who are part of a network should handle children and adolescents who are confused about their gender. The entire presentation can be seen here. It is about an hour long so you can watch the highlight reel below:
At the end of the training the PCPs are provided several resources, including Trevor Project which has is a known child sexual grooming operation. Trevor Project instructs kids on how to hide the screen from their parents and facilitates chats between adults and children in which children and adults have been found to engage in sexually-inappropriate discussions. You can read more about that here. MMB has several pages of screenshots proving the same that may be published later.
After MadMommaBear and MassResistance Texas tweeted out clips of the training and links to the pages of similar training on Twitter, the CMHCC quickly removed the pages from their website and took the video off of YouTube. This is hilarious but typical of institutions that have bad motives and want to cover it up so they can keep feeding off of the taxpayers.
In the presentation, Dr. Halle Ross Young utilizes an illustration called the “Genderbread Person” to illustrate differences between sex, gender, and presentation. It is really unscientific and rather unsophisticated. But what can you expect for woke nonsense? The Consortium instructs the PCPs that will inevitably be treating children in public schools, charter schools, private schools or religious schools according to this article published by JPS. The following excerpt is from their article and will help you understand the scope of Texas Child Health Access Through Telemedicine (TCHATT), which is part of the CPAN(Child Psychiatry Access Network) and CMHCC (the child mental health initiatives launched by the Texas Legislature in the 86th Legislative Session).
TCHATT is a program that provides limited, free telemedicine therapy to all children in Texas school districts expressing emotional needs that exceed the care the school counselor can provide. The program assists students in all Texas public, private, religious, or charter schools.
“TCHATT has enrolled programs, so we make connections with schools, and once the contract is set, all any student in those schools have to do is go to their counselor or teacher and say they want services,” Constance Siegel, LCSW, CCTP II, Manager, TCHATT & CPAN Programs said. “We are targeting all schools in Texas, so if they’re in a school that doesn’t have TCHATT, all they need to do is talk to their counselor.”
The program allows children to receive free evidence-based emotional health therapy by phone from home or school. The child meets with a licensed therapist or psychiatrist and completes four to five sessions to help improve their overall mental health. After reaching the limited amount of sessions, children will have the opportunity to further their services with an outside mental health service.
The article mentions program manager Constance Seigel as one of the child’s first points of contact when they enter the program.
“The TCHATT team consists of the clinical supervisor, Tisha Calhoun, manager, Constance Siegel, two case managers, and seven therapists. The therapists are on the frontline of the TCHATT program because they are the child’s first point of contact, so they must help the child feel comfortable during the process.”
Obviously, there is some ideological bent with the universities involved. UTSW Medical Center and Texas Tech HSC have opened pediatric gender clinics and a UTMB Galveston doctor has said in an interview with an LGBTQ publication that at their clinic patients under 18 are treated with parental consent which seems to contradict what the UTMB website indicates.
But it is not surprising given the trajectory of “transgender medicine” in the USA that these medical institutions are all on board with pediatric gender modification, even if it is somewhat covertly.
MadMommaBear began to wonder if there might be any other bias, particularly among the staff that interacts with children in the schools. She found that Constance Siegel (TCHATT and CPAN manager) at JPS Health Network is an out lesbian who is married to a “transwoman” according to this article at Dallas Voice. They identify as a “lesbian couple”. MMB is pretty sure that a man in a woman’s costume is not a woman, but the “experts” may disagree. While it may not be incredibly significant it is interesting. Dr Siegel manages the TCHATT and CPAN. Did she approve the training? But we should not consider this training to be simply the product of a rogue staffer.
Texas Tech and UTSW also presented sessions on pediatric gender modification. The archived seminar pages can be found here and here. The Texas CMHCC took the pages and the seminar videos down after MassResistance Texas posted about them on Twitter. The doctor who presented for UTSW is an absolute quack. She participated in a “study” of pediatric gender care which included a sample size of just 16 participants (hardly a statistically valid sample) and of course the study found the response to treatment to be “favorable”.
The Gender Mapper Project confirmed doctors associated with Texas Tech were prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to minors in 2021.
One of the doctors, Dr. Kelly Bennett (pronouns in bio) is seen below. She is a member of the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH), a biased advocacy group in which interested parties (mostly mental health providers and doctors making money off of trans medical abuse) advocate for increasingly lax standards for transgender health care. WPATH recently designated “eunuch” as a valid gender identity. WPATH recommends tucking and binding for youth. Any institution or doctor advancing WPATH diktat should be immediately relieved of their medical license and any government funding. Most of the organization leads identify as transgender or non-binary, it is not an unbiased organization and it seems to have disregarded any kind of medical ethics.
If Governor Greg Abbott and AG Ken Paxton believe as MadMommaBear does, that child gender modification is child abuse, then why are the state-funded institutions still teaching pediatric gender modification and all the woke garbage affiliated with it? Why are medical professionals and mental health professionals not prohibited from providing “gender-affirming care” in Texas? These mental health professionals are all fully on board with affirmation only which results in children almost always going on to puberty blockers and hormone therapy later. Children who are not affirmed but whose parents and practitioners practiced watchful waiting and allowed the child to advance through puberty overwhelmingly desist and go on to live healthy adult lives having recovered from distress associated with their biological sex. State mental health initiatives, taxpayer-funded medical schools, and health care institutions should not be peddling pseudoscience of gender ideology.
What is very concerning is the reach these institutions have into the schools where innocent children can be preyed upon by gender ideologists. The CMHCC published a tool detailing their reach. They are currently at 4,152 campuses in 501 school districts with 2,658,288 students who can access a provider through TCHATT.
All Texas Universities are woke and pushing transgender initiatives of one sort or another. Baylor College of Medicine’s, Dr. Gordon wrote this study in support of pediatric gender “affirming care” in November of 2022. She is Chair of Pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine, another medical school that is part of the CMHCC.
The Texas Legislature needs to abolish the Texas Child Mental Health Consortium, and defund the Universities that are engaged in peddling or practicing pediatric “gender-affirming care”. Children are not on loan to parents from the government for evenings and weekends. It is time to put the power back in the hands of parents.
Hundreds of millions of dollars to further harm children in Texas is a horrible use of taxpayer money and a violation of the trust placed in the Texas Legislature. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions and Texas Legislature helped pave the road.
Call your Texas House Rep and your Texas Senator and tell them to abolish the Child Mental Health Consortium.
Find your Texas Representative in the Texas House and your TX State Senator in the Texas Legislature here. Let them know that you do not want taxpayer dollars spent to fund any intiatives or institutions that are pushing transgender ideology or medicine and that includes the Child Mental Health Care Consortium.
The Texas House Committee on Budget Appropriations Subcommittee on Article III has to approve the appropriations for the CMHCC. Email them or call them and tell them not to give another dime to this initiative!
kronda.thimesch@house.texas.gov 512-463-0478
carl.tepper@house.texas.gov 512-463-0676
Geanie.Morrison@house.texas.gov 512-463-0456
carrie.isaac@house.texas.gov 512-463-0325
gary.vandeaver@house.texas.gov 512-463-0692
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