People rally outside of the Idaho state capitol for transgender rights in 2020.Photo: Katherine Jones/Idaho Statesman/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
Idaho’s House of Representatives passed a bill that would make it a felony for anyone to helptransgender children get gender-affirming health careand could lead to a sentence of life in prison.
The bill, HB 675, passed in the House with all but one Republican voting in favor, and will now go to Idaho’s Senate, where Republicans outnumber Democrats 28-7.
The bill is one of 29 different pieces of legislation that Republican-led state governments have introduced this year thatrestrict transgender children from getting health care. A few weeks earlier, in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott authorized the state’s Department of Family and Protective Servicesto investigate parents who are allowing their transgender children to get gender-affirming surgeries, calling it a form of “child abuse.”
Idaho’s sponsor of the bill, Republican Rep. Bruce Skaug, cited Texas' decision in his arguments for the bill, and called being transgender a “mental illness,“ABC News reported.
“We need to stop sterilizing and mutilating children under the age of 18,” Skaug said. “This is a mental illness that needs to be treated.”
In a counter argument, Democratic Rep. Ilana Rubel shared the story of a friend’s child who transitioned and went from a troubled kid to a happy college student.
“This is obviously not a step that a family takes lightly,” Rubel said. “This is a step that comes after literally thousands of hours of agonizing. There is no parent in the world who is just finding a way to force sex-change treatments on to their kids. They do this because they realize after endless excruciating probing that this is what their child needs.”
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Major medical organizations such as theAmerican Academy of Pediatrics, theAmerican Medical Associationand theAmerican Psychological Associationhave said that gender-affirming medical care is a medically-necessary service for transgender kids.
The Human Rights Campaign decried Idaho’s vote, calling it “textbook discrimination.”
source: people.com
