Last Updated on January 17, 2020
South Dakota is the next state to introduce a new bill criminalizing child gender transitions or healthcare for transgender minors.
The bill, introduced by Republican state Representative Fred Deutsch on Tuesday, and, according to The Hill, has been fast-tracked to be voted on by South Dakota’s House of Representatives on Friday, joining Georgia in drafting a bill criminalizing child gender transitions.
Providing ‘healthcare’ for transgender minors would become a Class 4 felony; for example, if a medical professional were to perform gender reassignment surgery on a minor.
House Bill 1057 also states that issuing or administering hormones such as puberty blockers would also constitute an offense, as it would be in an attempt “to change or affirm the minor’s perception of the minor’s sex, if that perception is inconsistent with the minor’s sex.”
According to House Bill 1057, all of the following procedures would be treated as a Class 4 felony:
Performing the following surgeries: castration, vasectomy, hysterectomy,
oophorectomy, metoidioplasty, orchiectomy, penectomy, phalloplasty, and
vaginoplasty;(2) Performing a mastectomy;
(3) Prescribing, dispensing, administering, or otherwise supplying the following
medications:(a) Puberty-blocking medication to stop normal puberty;
(b) Supraphysiologic doses of testosterone to females; or
(c) Supraphysiologic doses of estrogen to males; or(4) Removing any otherwise healthy or nondiseased body part or tissue.
New South Dakota bill would criminalize transgender health care for minors https://t.co/rTYNl5X4EF pic.twitter.com/szBcybPMl3
— The Hill (@thehill) January 16, 2020
Deutsch said that the “The Vulnerable Child Protection Act” would act as a “pause button” for minors experiencing gender dysphoria and seeks to protect children from “dangerous drugs and procedures,” in a statement emailed to National Review.
Deutsch also said, “The solution for children’s identification with the opposite sex isn’t to poison their bodies with mega-doses of the wrong hormones, to chemically or surgically castrate and sterilize them, or to remove healthy breasts and reproductive organs. The solution is compassionate care, and that doesn’t include catastrophically and irreversibly altering their bodies.”
The ACLU called the bill a “streak of discrimination of transgender youth in the state.”
A similar bill was introduced in Georgia last year, which would also criminalize medical professionals–or anybody else–found guilty of medically assisting a minor with a gender transition.
