Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis touted legislation giving victims suffering from “irreversible damage” after undergoing a sex-change operation the ability to sue the doctors who performed the surgeries.
DeSantis signed S.B. 245 Wednesday which bans sex-change operations for minors and gives anyone who later regrets their decision the ability to take legal action against the medical professionals who “put their ideology ahead of evidence-based medicine.” The governor called on medical professionals who perform sex-reassignment surgeries on minors to be prosecuted.
“We also did a bill, which is sad that we’re even having to discuss this, to criminalize the mutilation of minors who are undergoing the sex-change operations by these really rogue, ideological physicians and we’ve had heartbreaking testimony from people that have gone through this when they were minors. Now they’re adults and this is something they are now having to overcome really for the rest of their lives because irreversible changes were made. We banned this administratively last year through our medical board so if a medical doctor did this, they lose the license in Florida, which is appropriate.”
“But we felt you had to do more, I mean if you’re taking off the private parts of some 15-year-old kid, you know you should go to jail for that,” he continued. “This is just totally unacceptable. One of the things we did in that bill though, is we’re giving the victims the ability to sue the physicians. So if you’ve gone through this as a 16-year-old or a 15-year-old, now you’re 24 or 25 and you have all this irreversible damage, you bring suit against them because they violated the Hippocratic Oath, they put their ideology ahead of evidence-based medicine, and we just think that’s fundamentally wrong in the state of Florida.”
In October, the Florida Board of Medicine voted to ban sex reassignment surgeries, puberty blockers and hormone procedures for minors after hearing testimony from detransitioners such as Chloe Cole. Detransitioners are individuals who previously identified as transgender, but have since returned to identifying by their biological sex.
Decades of follow-up research shows that anywhere from 65% to 94% of transgender kids grow out of identifying as trans by the time they reach adulthood, according to KFF Health News. (RELATED: ‘That Is Mutilation’: DeSantis Claps Back At Reporter Asking About Sex Reassignment Procedures For Kids)
DeSantis doubled down on criticisms from President Joe Biden who called bans on these procedures for children “sinful.”
“It is not ‘sinful’ to prohibit the mutilation of minors,” DeSantis said in March. “It is not acceptable for the federal government to mandate that procedures like sex change operations be allowed for kids.”
U.S. states such as Indiana, Alabama and Iowa have all banned sex change treatments for minors. Foreign countries including the U.K, Finland and Norway agree that there are likely no benefits to puberty blockers and hormone procedures for gender-dysphoric youth, leading England’s National Health Service (NHS) to ban puberty blockers for minors.