11 states move to criminalize child sex change treatments under newly proposed laws

More than twenty bills aimed at criminalizing child sex changes have been introduced at the beginning of the 2023 state legislative sessions, reports the Associated Press.

Republican state lawmakers are seeking to ban so-called gender-affirming care for youth due to the complete lack of quality evidence to support it, the invasive and irreversible nature of the interventions, and the sharply rising rates of detransition and regret.

Eleven states - Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Virginia - have proposed legislation to protect children and adolescents from what one pediatric neurosurgeon recently called "an extraordinary medical atrocity."

Lawmakers in South Carolina and Kansas seek to ban doctors from performing experimental sex changes on anyone under 21, while similar legislation in Oklahoma would ban sex changes for all youth under age 26. 

The interventions performed by "gender-affirming care" providers include experimental puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones, the combination of which is thought to leave the young person infertile. Next comes surgery, including bilateral mastectomies and hysterectomies, or surgical castration and penis amputation, which again result in infertility, and in many cases, a complete lack of sexual function. 

Doctors have long known that the adolescent brain does not reach full maturity until around age 25, and while it is very common for teenagers and young adults to be adamant that they will never want children, no doctor would ever perform vasectomies and tubal ligation on a young person still in the crucial stage of identity development. Therefore, these proposed bans on "gender-affirming care" simply seek to bring the field of gender medicine in line with all other areas of general medicine.

HB 42 in Texas would classify prescribing off-label puberty blockers and harmful cross-sex hormones to gender-distressed children and adolescents as child abuse. 

In Montana, two separate bills have been introduced by Republican Senator John Fuller. The first seeks to ban doctors from providing hormonal interventions to those under 18, and the second proposes to ban sex change surgeries for those under 18, citing the lack of evidence that the benefits outweigh the risks and pointing to the high rates of suicidality and mortality observed post-surgery.

In Tennessee, Republican legislators are making protecting children from becoming the victims of this reckless medical experiment a top priority with a pre-filed bill that states "minors lack the maturity to fully understand and appreciate the life-altering consequences of such procedures."

Trans activists who campaign for youth sex changes argue that all the major medical associations recommend "gender-affirming care" and cite that as a reason to oppose these bans. 

While it is true that professional bodies have been ideologically captured by activist groups, other nations are starting to abandon the model of care pushed by the likes of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH).

Sweden recently broke ranks with the affirmative care guidelines of WPATH, with one expert citing the group’s removal of all lower age limits for sex changes and its inclusion of "eunuch" as a valid gender identity even a child can possess as evidence that WPATH is not a scientific group but rather an activist organization.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recently backtracked on its support of pediatricians performing sex changes on children. In 2018, the AAP produced a position statement supporting affirmation and medical intervention for gender dysphoric youth, despite there being no evidence to support that decision. But in 2022, the professional organization issued a statement saying that for the vast majority of children, hormonal and surgical interventions are not recommended.