The Louisiana House voted on Tuesday to override Gov. John Bel Edward’s (D-LA) veto of a bill banning gender transition medicine for minors.
The chamber voted 75 to 23, with seven abstentions, in a special session to override the veto of House Bill 648, which prevents healthcare providers from facilitating medical gender transitions for minors, including the prescription of cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers.
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The legislation also prohibits the “performance of any sterilizing surgeries” on minors or “any surgery that artificially constructs tissue having the appearance of genitalia differing from the minor’s sex.”
Edwards issued a six-page veto message on June 29 because “HB 648 is so blatantly defective on so many levels that brevity [was] impossible.”
“Data and facts do not support the need for this bill,” Edwards wrote at the time. “There are so many fundamental problems with this bill that I must believe that many of its most staunch supporters have never read it word by word, line by line like I have.”
“I think that in this instance, in following other Southern states passing this bill, legislators put politics over people without considering the practical impacts of the bill. … This certainly isn’t an example of small, limited government that the bill proponents profess to champion,” Edwards said.
Republican state Rep. Gabe Firment, the author of the bill, said on July 14 in advance of the veto session that the legislature must “simply protect kids from irreversible experimental medical interventions.”
My official statement on next week’s veto session. #HB648 #lalege pic.twitter.com/vxMn8iV1LW
— State Representative Gabe Firment (@FirmentGabe) July 14, 2023
“Every single Southern state has already passed similar legislation to protect their children,” Firment said. “We cannot allow Louisiana to become a sanctuary state for the sterilization of innocent children.”
Anti-youth transition activist Chloe Cole, who started puberty blockers at 13 years old and had a double mastectomy at 15 years old before reversing her medical gender transition at 16, also expressed concerns that Louisiana would “become a hotbed” if Edwards’s veto was not overridden by the legislature.
This is why Louisiana is so important to ending child sterilization for purposes of cross sex mimicry:
We need kids in the south to be protected from this malpractice. The butchers will flock from Florida and Texas.
Louisiana will become a hotbed. #lalege pic.twitter.com/2yeSfdGWpD
— Chloe Cole ⭐️ (@ChoooCole) July 14, 2023
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Stanley Goldfarb, chairman of the anti-youth transition medicine organization Do No Harm, told the Washington Examiner that the “Louisiana legislature has a historic opportunity to save many children from lifelong medical problems, such as infertility, poor bone development, and other complications of hormonal and surgical therapies.”
The Senate is expected to also override Edwards’s veto during the special session.
