The law would direct that doctors who perform “genital gender reassignment surgery” on minors would be guilty of “inflicting great bodily injury upon a child.”
State Rep. John McCravy, a sponsor of the bill, told CNA that there are “few things we do as legislators that are more important than protecting vulnerable children.”
“One of those important legislative protections is to protect minors from so-called gender transition procedures,” he said.
“Growing evidence shows that puberty blockers are not safe and result in irreversible, physical, and emotional damages including mood disorders, seizures, and cognitive impairment,” McCravy argued.
The South Carolina bill ”also protects minors from the irreversible effects of sex hormones” as well as from “radical and irreversible surgeries,” he said.
“I talked to a pediatrician who told me that less than 10 years ago these procedures would have been called child abuse. Enough said.”
Youth protections
The early state-level efforts in 2024 continue a year of major youth protection reforms from other states throughout the country.
The state of Texas in June passed a law forbidding doctors from performing irreversible genital surgeries and mastectomies on children in order to make them appear to be the opposite sex. Doctors are also forbidden from prescribing drugs to children for that purpose.
State Rep. Tom Oliverson, a physician, told CNA that he got involved in the legislation last year after hearing testimony from a doctor who treats transgender-identified youth. The doctor’s testimony, Oliverson said, raised “a thousand red flags” among himself and several colleagues.
“When the issue came back up this session, I had some stakeholder groups that had reached out to me,” Oliverson said. “It was already on my mind and my heart. I’d been praying about it. The groups say, ‘We really feel like we need a physician to lead the charge on this.’ I agreed to do it.”
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Oliverson described the bill as “the hardest piece of legislation I’ve ever carried.”
“I’ve passed a lot of bills,” he said. “I’m probably in the top 10% of House members over the last 10 years [for bill passage].” But the transgender legislation “became a hill that the opposition wanted to die on.”
“From my perspective, the science is so shaky on this,” he said of transgender medicine. “Just how terrible the quality of the science is that supports the use of these treatments. There are no large randomized controlled trials. All of the systematic reviews of the literature indicate that there is no benefit to these treatments in reducing the risk of suicide and actually improving the patient’s well-being.”
The doctor said that Republicans “feel very good” about the law surviving legal challenges.
“We believe it’s entirely constitutional,” he said. “As much as I am a parent and respect parental rights, the state has a right to step in and prevent parents from doing things which are proven to be harmful.”
Alabama, meanwhile, passed its own ban on transgender minor procedures in 2022. The law, called the Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act, bans sex-changing surgeries and cross-sex hormonal treatments on minors and includes criminal penalties of up to 10 years in prison for those performing or administering sex-change procedures to children.
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