GOPers Announce Plans To Punish Child Trans Surgeries

Republican Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., hosted a panel on Wednesday with Republican lawmakers and conservatives, discussing legislative plans to stop the mutilation of children by the American medical establishment through transgender surgeries and procedures.

The legislation discussed included a bill officially legally defining “male” and “female” to reflect biological reality and an eventual bill prohibiting doctors from performing harmful medical procedures on children. During the discussion, Marshall also expressed that doctors who castrate and mutilate children with irreversible drugs and surgeries should have their medical licenses taken away.

Terry Schilling, president of the conservative advocacy group American Principles Project and member of the panel, cited leaked files from the World Professional Association of Transgender Health that revealed medical professionals worldwide conducted transgender procedures on minors while knowing they were scientifically unsubstantiated and without properly disclosing the risks. He asked Marshall — who has over two decades of experience as an OB-GYN — how he would respond if he was running a practice where the doctors were engaging in “such detrimental conduct.”

“[W]hat’s your message to the medical community?” Schilling also asked.

“I’m almost speechless,” Marshall answered. “I think, first of all, the state board would take away their license, for starters. You think about what people are doing here again, it’s irreversible. Oftentimes, they’re doing things without parental permission. I think they would lose their ability to practice in that particular facility as well.”

Marshall went on to discuss how the issue goes beyond the “profit margin” behind these harmful procedures, amounting to “an attack on our values.”

“I think ultimately, people … are saying that God is wrong — that the sex we were given, that God must have been wrong on this, and if you would just change your sex, it would solve all your problems,” he said.

He also spoke about the biological reality of sex and natural development, suggesting that “irreversible,” so-called “gender-affirming” procedures can ultimately interfere with these things.

“It is just sad that we are doing these irreversible procedures,” he said, noting, for example, how, “once a lady starts taking testosterone, she’s going to have facial changes that never go away.” He also said that certain hormones can lead to osteoporosis and “impact future fertility.”

Marshall announced The Safeguarding The Overall Protection of Minors (STOP) Act during the panel, which he said would be introduced “in the next week or two.” The legislation would reportedly put heavy fines (to the tune of $100,000) on doctors who perform transgender surgeries or prescribe related drugs to minors.

According to a recent poll by the Napolitan News Service, the vast majority of Americans (72 percent) believe it should be illegal “to provide children under 18 with puberty blockers, drugs, and/or [transgender] surgery.” This included 86 percent of Republicans and 58 percent of Democrats, the Daily Signal reported.

“Any doctor who performs a sex change on a child should be put in jail,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., said during the panel discussion ahead of Marshall’s discussion of the STOP Act. Earlier this year, Tuberville introduced the Protection of Women in Olympic and Amateur Sports Act “to prohibit men from competing in women’s Olympic sports.”

Marshall also recently introduced the Defining Male and Female Act of 2024 in the Senate, which would “codify legal definitions of male, female, and sex to ensure they are based on biology rather than ideology,” according to a Wednesday press release regarding the Act. The legislation would restore the “legal right” to “sex-separate sports and scholarships,” as well as the “sex separation of restrooms” and other private spaces. The bill would fight back against the Biden administration’s efforts to warp major portions of civil rights law to benefit persons claiming to not identify with their own sex.

Rep. Mary Miller, R-Ill., also on the panel, introduced the companion bill in the House in July.

Sarah Parshall Perry, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, was also among the panelists. She urged during the discussion that the left’s “gender industrialized complex, in all of its applications” is ultimately about “getting children.”

She noted how in Colorado and Connecticut, “legislators have downgraded the felony offenses for indecent exposure to minors” because they supposedly “unfairly target the drag and trans communities.” She also highlighted how “researchers at Johns Hopkins University have [substituted] language on ‘minor-attracted persons’ for the less anodyne sounding ‘pedophile,’” to effectively make it “just another sexual orientation.”

Perry commended the lawmakers’ efforts to “protect biological reality.”

The transgender “medical” industry is worth about $4.5 billion right now and aims to “transition all 1.3 million Americans who identify as trans,” Schilling said, noting how, if that happens, the industry will balloon to $200 billion. But “they want to grow that 1.3 number, too,” he later said. “That’s what the whole trans ideology in schools is about … They’ve literally weaponized our tax dollars in our schools to brainwash our kids and get them into this very lucrative pipeline.”

“It is an industry that is meant to make money, and they are disguising themselves as a civil rights movement because it’s not very popular to make billions of dollars from sterilizing children and even adults,” Schilling also noted during the panel.

As the panel came to a close, Marshall was adamant that “to do this type of surgery, these irreversible hormones that they’re giving, is absolutely child abuse.”

“These young children — adolescents — are not emotionally mature enough to make [such] a long-term decision,” he said.

Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered education and culture issues for the Washington Examiner and Breitbart News. He holds a degree from the University of Virginia and is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.