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If the bill soon to be introduced by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) passes, doctors will think twice before agreeing to perform gender transition surgeries on minors.
The Protect Minors from Medical Malpractice Act of 2022 would hold medical practitioners liable for injuries that minors sustain from gender transition procedures. It would also empower such minors, along with their legal guardians, to sue up to 30 years after they turn 18.
The bill also seeks to preserve “freedom of conscience and medical judgment” by doctors, prohibiting federal law from requiring them to perform gender transition procedures. The Biden Department of Health and Human Services pushed on multiple occasions to force doctors to perform such procedures before encountering trouble in court.
The bill also counters President Joe Biden’s recent executive order directing the Department of Health and Human Services to expand access to “gender-affirming care.”
“The Biden administration released official guidance recommending irreversible and life-altering surgery for minors too young to apply for a learner’s permit,” Banks said in a statement. “These procedures lack any solid evidence and have been rejected by public health agencies around the world.”
Banks also predicted that the crisis would grow over the next decade.
“Ten years from now, there will be hundreds of thousands of Americans who were permanently scarred by the radical Left’s agenda before they reached adulthood,” he said. “If Democrats truly supported gender-confused children, they’d support our effort to give them legal recourse.”
Statistically, most children simply outgrow gender dysphoria. Studies show dysphoria “recedes with puberty” for up to 80% of children not affirmed in a different gender.
Four states have passed laws prohibiting gender-transitioning procedures for minors, including puberty-blockers, surgeries, and cross-sex hormones, while 15 states have legislation on the table, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Cotton’s and Banks’s bill takes a different approach, giving people who have been harmed a legal remedy and making doctors more hesitant to prescribe the procedures to youth who cannot yet understand the full extent of their decisions.
The bill is right to identify gender transition procedures for children as “medical malpractice.” Doctors are supposed to provide sound, evidence-based advice, not cater to every whim or desire of the children in their care. In no other circumstance would a rational adult attempt to justify subjecting a healthy young person to reconstruction surgeries or drugs designed to alter the body physically.
Although the bill does not outright ban gender-transitioning procedures, the doctors who conduct them would risk lawsuits from unhappy patients well into the future. And, given that the outcomes of these procedures are not as wonderful as advocates claim, those lawsuits will likely be an effective deterrent.
Doctors who hastily prescribe puberty blockers or surgery leave adolescents to grapple with permanent physical consequences and problems that include reduced bone density, infertility, and other sexual health issues. A recent Heritage Foundation study also suggested that “easing access to cross-sex treatments without parental consent significantly increases suicide rates.”
A growing group of “detransitioners” is already speaking out against providing such procedures to youth. For many, accessing affirming medical procedures or drugs as a minor was shockingly easy and came with few questions. Some were aided by public schools with policies that exclude parents from the conversation and hide their child’s decision to transition. Surveys have found nearly half of detransitioners believe they were not adequately informed by medical professionals prior to making their decision.
A young woman who is told puberty blockers will alleviate her dysphoria may have no complaints at the initial prescription. But regret may set in years later when she misses the development that was stunted by the drugs. The Protect Minors from Medical Malpractice Act will fill a crucial gap in enabling people to take legal action after the consequences of irresponsible medical advice have set in.
