Last November, state Majority Leaders William Lamberth (R) and Jack Johnson (R) introduced the Protecting Children from Gender Mutilation Act in hopes of providing the nation's strongest protections against irreversible elective procedures that cause intentional harm to patients.
House Bill 1/Senate Bill 1 bans so-called gender-affirming medical treatment and mutilation surgeries on minors until they come of legal age, and it creates a private right of action allowing a minor injured due to a violation of the law to sue for damages.
"Unfortunately, some of these kind of far-Left ideologues have started pushing in the medical community that somehow or another, cutting off parts or adding on parts to a child during their adolescence will help them," Lamberth tells AFN. "The science just doesn't prove that, and common sense certainly would disagree with that. We're just not going to allow that in Tennessee."
The bill does allow medical treatment for certain other physical problems a youth might experience, but any doctor who goes beyond that and violates the terms risks the revocation of his or her medical license.
"We also allow for a civil penalty, in essence a lawsuit against the doctors, the parents, insurance companies -- really anybody … that is engaging in an illegal medical procedure in Tennessee," the lawmaker continues. "We also grant the attorney general's office a kind of a three-pronged approach here in the administrative proceedings where the attorney general's office could pursue certain penalties against these individuals if they were to conduct these illegal medical experiments on our children."
The legislation allows courts to impose an additional $25,000 penalty for each violation. Dozens of lawmakers have already co-signed as sponsors of the bill.
