Last week, South Dakota state Rep. Fred Deutsch introduced H.B. 1057, the Vulnerable Child Protection Act, a bill to protect gender-confused children from experimental treatments that could leave them scarred for life.
“Every child in South Dakota should be protected from dangerous drugs and treatments,” Deutsch said in a news release. “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.”
H.B. 1057 would make it a felony for doctors to perform experimental “treatments” on minors. It specifically outlaws: genital surgeries such as castration, vasectomy, hysterectomy, and others; mastectomy; “prescribing, dispensing, administering, or otherwise supplying” medication to stop puberty and doses of testosterone to females or estrogen to males; and “removing any otherwise healthy or nondiseased body part or tissue.”
While many pro-transgender doctors have claimed the supposed “treatments” are safe and irreversible, no studies have backed up that claim. Transgender activists warn that people with gender dysphoria — a person’s persistent and painful identification with the gender opposite his or her biological sex — are more likely to commit suicide without experimental medical treatments and social support for their transgender identities. In fact, even in very pro-trans societies like Sweden, those who have undergone transgender surgery are more likely to commit suicide.
“Parents are further told that these treatments are well-studied, safe, and necessary. They are warned that if they do not consent to medical treatment, their child will be at higher risk of suicide,” Deutsch explained. “But there’s no evidence to support this claim. Kids who are contemplating suicide require evaluation and treatment for conditions such as depression and anxiety. Castration, hysterectomies, puberty blockers and high dose hormones are not treatments for psychological conditions.”
Deutsch told PJ Media that H.B. 1057 has garnered 48 co-sponsors in the South Dakota House. “Lots of people are mad at me,” he said in an understatement.
“Respecting and affirming a young person’s identity is critical to their health and wellbeing,” Sam Brinton, head of advocacy and government affairs for the LGBT suicide prevention group The Trevor Project, told the New York Daily News. Brinton claimed H.B. 1057 “would put young lives at risk in South Dakota.”
In an interview with the Christian Post’s Brandon Showalter, Deutsch explained that the bill is not right-wing but a measure to protect children in South Dakota. Testimony will include progressives and transgender people.
“I reached across the aisle to bring on board people with various views. We’ll have a progressive testify, we’ll have transgender people testify that believe it’s child abuse to provide these interventions on children,” he said.
“This bill is a pause-button bill,” Deutsch explained. “It says leave our kids alone and let them mature and let the normal, beneficial effects of puberty act upon their systems. We know from the literature that approximately 85 percent of children that are confused about whether or not they are a boy or a girl that the confusion goes away naturally. But you don’t mess with them with opposite-sex hormones, puberty blockers or surgeries that mutilate.”
Deutsch also introduced a bill in 2016 to preserve sex-segregated privacy in spaces such as restrooms and changing rooms. Then-Gov. Dennis Daugaard, a Republican, ultimately vetoed the bill under immense pressure. The legislator also predicted that current Republican Gov. Kristi Noem will face similar pressure, but he insisted that protecting children is an even more serious issue.
While medical associations have rushed to embrace the transgender ideology, many professionals have warned against it.
Dr. Michelle Cretella, a pediatrician and executive director of the American College of Pediatricians, condemned transgender “treatments” on children as “child abuse.” As she put it in a recent video, “See, if you want to cut off a leg or an arm, you’re mentally ill, but if you want to cut off healthy breasts or a pen*s, you’re transgender.”
Endocrinologist Dr. Michael Laidlaw has warned that so-called puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones actually give healthy children a disease. Charlotte Evans, a woman who formerly identified as a man and is now leading a network of detransitioners in Britain, insisted that gender confusion usually resolves when a person’s brain is fully formed around age 25, but hormones and surgery can damage that brain development and set children along a dangerous life-long path.
The promotion of this form of “treatment” has left people scarred for life — and in many cases, permanently sterilized.
“Now that I’m all healed from the surgeries, I regret them,” a 19-year-old man who had himself surgically mutilated to affirm a female identity, wrote in a letter. “The result of the bottom surgery looks like a Frankenstein hack job at best, and that got me thinking critically about myself. I had turned myself into a plastic-surgery facsimile of a woman, but I knew I still wasn’t one. I became (and to an extent, still feel) deeply depressed.”
Transgender activist Jazz Jennings experienced complications during the surgery to remove his male genitals, leaving him with scars across the top of his legs.
Even those who stopped shy of the genital mutilation have found themselves permanently scarred.
“I am a real, live 22-year-old woman, with a scarred chest and a broken voice, and five o’clock shadow because I couldn’t face the idea of growing up to be a woman, that’s my reality,” admitted Cari Stella.
Legislators like Deutsch have been inspired to act after the case of the 6-year-old boy James Younger, whose mother insists he is a girl. The mother has testified that she intends to carry out genital mutilation on her son. Many legislators have already introduced similar bills to protect children from the damaging effects of transgender drugs, and Deutsch’s bill will be far from the last.
Tyler O’Neil is the author of Making Hate Pay: The Corruption of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Follow him on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.
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