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 |  Subject: Delightful: South Dakota House passes bill restricting medical treatments for transgender youth  Wed Jan 29, 2020 11:01 pm | |
| South Dakota’s Republican-dominated House passed a bill on Wednesday that would ban physicians from treating transgender children with hormones and sex reassignment surgery, making it the first state to take action on a flurry of bills restricting medical interventions for transgender youth.
Lawmakers voted 46-23 in favor of the bill, which makes it a misdemeanor for doctors to provide puberty blockers or other treatments affecting gender expression to children under 16 years old. It carries a maximum penalty of one year in jail and a fine of up to $2,000.
The bill will be sent to the state Senate for a committee hearing as soon as next week.
Rep. Fred Deutsch, the bill’s primary sponsor, said the legislation would protect vulnerable children who “are being chemically castrated, sterilized, and surgically mutilated.”
“This is a bill of compassion,” Deutsch said as he introduced the bill at Wednesday’s hearing. “It simply says wait, wait until your 16th birthday.”
But to parents and advocates of transgender children, along with many members of the medical community, the bill is a form of discrimination that would take away lifesaving treatments. The debate is a stark symbol of the nation’s culture wars, with Republican and Democratic lawmakers disputing not just medical studies, but also parenting and the role of doctors in American life.
Conservative state legislators in Florida, Colorado, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Kentucky have filed similar bills, which they argue protect young people from making what they call “life-altering changes.” Some lawmakers say sex-reassignment surgery and hormone treatments aren’t health care and should be considered criminal acts that are harmful for children.
LGBTQ advocates argue that such bills are unconstitutional and that decisions about medical treatments for gender expression should be between the young person, parents and their doctor. They also say surgeries are rarely performed on youth and puberty blockers, which require parental consent and extensive counseling, are reversible.
“By blocking medical care supported by every major medical association, the legislature is compromising the health of trans youth in dangerous and potentially life-threatening ways,” Libby Skarin, policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of South Dakota, said in a statement after Wednesday’s vote.
The ACLU said it would launch a legal challenge to the South Dakota ban and others if they becomes law. In response, the Liberty Counsel, a conservative Christian organization, has offered pro-bono legal counsel to defend the bill at no charge to taxpayers, according to Rep. Lee Qualm, the Republican majority leader of the South Dakota House, who read a letter from the organization at Wednesday’s hearing.
On Friday, South Dakota’s Republican Gov. Kristi L. Noem said she has “concerns” about the bill.
“When you take public policy and try to fill parenting gaps with more government, you have to be very careful about the precedent you’re setting,” Noem said in a statement to reporters.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/south-dakota-house-passes-bill-restricting-medical-treatments-for-transgender-youth/2020/01/29/8578b550-413d-11ea-b503-2b077c436617_story.html |
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