The Florida Board of Medicine voted Aug. 5 to begin the rule-making process to ban transgender treatments for minors. If the proposed rule is adopted, it would prohibit doctors from performing gender transition surgeries and prescribing puberty blockers for those under 18 diagnosed with gender dysphoria.
Of the 15-member medical board, only one member voted not to proceed. The vote means that the board will now begin a several month process of drafting the proposed rule, making sure the board and all interested parties agree on the specific language used in the rule.
Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo told reporters that the recommendations are “aligned with the truth.”
“By truth, I mean truth in science, in terms of what we actually know versus what people want to happen,” Ladapo said. “I feel like this is a recurring theme. Unfortunately, it is a recurring theme where we are seeing political beliefs overtake scientific reasoning, scientific data.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has long been critical of transgender treatments for minors.
“They are actually giving very young girls double mastectomies, they want to castrate these young boys,” he said during an Aug. 3 press conference. “That’s wrong, and so we’ve stood up and said both from the health and children well-being perspective, you don’t disfigure 10-, 12-, 13-year-old kids based on gender dysphoria.”
Quentin Van Meter, a pediatric endocrinologist who served as an expert for the state on the issue, warned the board that more and more children are receiving puberty blockers and other transgender treatments without fully being aware of the risks.
“We’re dealing with a monumental epidemic of increasing proportions,” Van Meter said. “This is a giant experiment on United States children.”
Anthony Verdugo, founder and executive director of the Christian Family Coalition Florida, explained that minors should not be expected to make life-altering decisions.
“Once they are adults they can do what they want. But minors simply do not have the mental capacity to make these life-altering decisions. Parents cannot allow a child to smoke or drink or drive a car at the age of 3.”
Chloe Cole’s personal experience confirms Verdugo’s assertion.
Cole, 17, shared her testimony during a public hearing before the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration in July. She said that at the age of 13 she “wasn’t capable of understanding” the ramifications of her decision to transition to a male identity.
Between the ages of 13 and 16, Cole took testosterone, puberty-blocking drugs and even had a double mastectomy. She has since decided to reverse course and admits, “[Transitioning] is not the path that I should have taken.”
Cole now encourages parents to not seek out transgender treatments for their children.
“No child should have to experience what I have,” she said.
HD Editor’s Note: Why Is This News Biblically Relevant?
Astonishingly, many today disagree with laws that safeguard minors from gender mutilating surgeries. This disturbing reality demonstrates that our society has suffered a profound “loss of natural affection” for our children, a characteristic the apostle Paul stated would be prevalent in the time prior to the return of Christ (2 Timothy 3:1-3).
Ken Ham the founder and CEO of Answers In Genesis recently wrote an article documenting the horrific stories of those who have received hormones and procedures to “transition” their biological gender.
“More and more detransitioners (those who transitioned in the past and have now returned to their actual gender/sex) are speaking up and decrying the movement that has brought them misery, mental and physical pain, and no actual help,” he described. “Of course, these stories don’t line up with the narrative of ‘transition your child or they will commit suicide,’ so they are repressed by the media.”
“This is the horror transgender activists are pushing young children toward—a life of truly irreversible damage to their bodies,” he stressed.
Our society, including parents, pushing children into this lifestyle endangers not only their lives on earth, but also places them in peril beyond this life by encouraging them to live in rejection of God and His design.
“Those who think biblically (building their worldview on the Bible—beginning in Genesis) know that despising God’s design of male and female (Genesis 1:27), ignoring biological reality, and heavily emphasizing these things to children will have real-world consequences,” Ham warned.
In Matthew 18:6, Jesus specifically warned against people causing children to stumble or sin, saying that it would be better “that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea” than to do so.
“The medical and social experiment currently unfolding is leaving victims in its wake and it’s our duty as Christians to speak up for the vulnerable and defend them against those who would use and abuse them. We cannot stay silent,” Ham urged. “We must speak ‘for such a time as this’ (Esther 4:14).”
