According to data compiled by the Human Rights Campaign last November, nearly half the country (22 states) had laws or policy on the books to protect minors from irreversibly changing their bodies. And transgender adults are voicing concern.
In January, in the days before his veto of a bill that would have protected minors from gender manipulation procedures was overridden, Gov. Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) issued an executive order directing state health agencies to propose rules to require a team of specialists to be involved in prescribing so-called gender-affirming care.
The move was seen as new restrictions for adult care.
"The Left is threatened by the movement we're seeing for children," Dr. Jennifer Bauwens, director of the Family Research Council's Center for Family Studies, told Washington Watch Thursday.
Meanwhile, Axios reports that three other states have limited or sought to limit procedures for transgender adults.
Despite the claims of two separate medical associations dedicated to advancing transgender care that manipulative and mutilative procedures are not experimental, Bauwens asserts, "It's very much experimental."
"We see how poor the data is that's been used to support these practices," she referenced. "A report from WPATH, a transgender health organization, had one of the surgeons doing a presentation saying, 'There are these gender clinics popping up all over the place. Some of these surgeons aren't trained well, but some care is better than no care.'"
Planned Parenthood clinics are among those that now offer such services.
But the development and maturation of the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in high-order cognitive processes like decision-making, reasoning, and personality expression, occurs primarily during adolescence and is not fully accomplished until the age of 25, according to The National Institutes of Health.
In other words, minors are particularly susceptible to rushed or aggressive consultation that encourages discontent with their biological sex rather than helping them work through thoughts and feelings.
"Gender dysphoria is a mere symptom of some other issues that are going on," Bauwens told show host Tony Perkins. "If you go down this path, it's not going to lead to wholeness and happiness. It may in the short term, because you got what has been promoted as an answer to you, but it's not going to produce fruit in the long term."
But instead of giving proper assessments and looking at underlying conditions, she lamented that many clinics are immediately prescribing medications that utterly transform the body and brain chemistry.
"That is not how you do healthcare," she stated.
"That's why we have to work even harder to protect children first when it comes to these types of procedures," Bauwens said. "They're the most vulnerable. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure it out. Kids can't make decisions about what they're going to wear to school tomorrow, let alone gender identity."
The Left and those pushing the LGBTQ+ agenda are not backing down from forcing public affirmation of what they are doing, and Perkins noted that we are now seeing a "very coordinated effort to intimidate and silence policymakers, to stir up fear" about those who want to protect children, saying they want to interfere with everyone's right to do what they want to do.
Bauwens said that is a sign of the progress the truth is making.
"At the end of the day, we're all about protecting people, loving people well, promoting practices that will bring healing, life, and wholeness to them and to communities," she stated. "This is a very loving position that we're taking to say [gender transition] isn't the way."
