a joint Florida committee two medical boards voted last week to draft a rule banning puberty blockers and other gender dysphoria treatments for minors in the state.
The Florida Board of Medicine and the State Board of Osteopathic Medicine voted Friday in favor of a plan barring anyone under the age of 18 from having sex reassignment surgery or taking hormones. The vote came after a nearly five-hour discussion, during which experts and the public expressed their opinions.
“These are life-altering effects for children,” Blaise Trettis said, according to Click On Orlando. “I don’t think they are emotionally or psychologically capable of making this decision for life.”
Others spoke out against the ban, including a transgender woman who said the ban on such treatment was “simply unacceptable”.
FLORIDA BANS USE OF MEDICAID ON GENDER-AFFIRMING TREATMENTS
A protester holds the trans flag and waves in solidarity with other speakers, during a protest at the Ohio Statehouse in Columbus, Ohio on June 25, 2021.
(Stephen Zenner/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
“People’s lives are at stake here,” said Amy Rachel. “Some deliberately spread misinformation about the transgender community and the types of treatments available and administered.”
Councils will meet Nov. 4 for a final vote on the plan, Click on Orlando reported.
The councils had agreed in August to begin a 120-day process to start developing rules around gender dysphoria treatments for children.
The move comes after the Florida Department of Health issued guidelines in April rejecting federal government guidelines approving puberty blockers and “partially reversible” hormone therapy as methods of “assertive care” for minors. Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo criticized the federal guidelines as a political move that lacks evidence of helping young people.
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo and Governor Ron DeSantis at a press conference in West Palm Beach, Fla. on Thursday, Jan. 6, 2022. (Joe Cavaretta/Sun Sentinel/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
((Joe Cavaretta/Sun Sentinel/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
“The federal government’s medical establishment publishing guidance that fails at the most basic level of academic rigor shows it was never about health care,” Ladapo said in a statement. “It was about injecting a political ideology into the health of our children. Children with gender dysphoria should be supported by their family and seek advice, not pressured into making an irreversible decision before they turn 18.”
The state leadership added that “[s]Systematic reviews on hormone treatment in young people show a tendency for low-quality evidence, small sample sizes, and medium to high risk of bias.
Governor Ron DeSantis on Thursday pushed back against a CDC recommendation that the COVID-19 vaccine should be added to the agency’s recommended childhood schedule.
(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Under the administration of Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, the state’s Agency for Health Care Administration decided this summer to ban health care providers from billing the state’s Medicaid program for treatments such as sex reassignment surgery, puberty blockers or hormone therapies.
DeSantis said in August that doctors who “disfigure” young children “on the basis of gender dysphoria” should face legal consequences.
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“They don’t tell you what it is… They actually do double mastectomies on very young girls, they want to castrate these young boys,” DeSantis said over the summer. “Both from a child health and welfare perspective, you don’t disfigure 10, 12, 13 year olds with gender dysphoria, 80% of them resolve anyway at the when they get old… So why would you be doing this?”