Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves signs bill banning transgender surgeries for minors

Mississippi on Tuesday turned the seventh state within the Union to ban intercourse reassignment procedures for minors after Republican Gov. Tate Reeves signed the Regulate Experimental Adolescent Procedures, or REAP, Act. 

The Republican-controlled Mississippi legislature accredited the invoice on Feb. 21 and Reeves, who’s operating for re-election, promised to signal it into legislation. In 2021, Reeves signed a legislation that prohibits transgender athletes who establish as feminine from competing in women’ and girls’s sports activities. 

“There’s a harmful motion spreading throughout America as we speak,” Reeves mentioned on the invoice signing ceremony. “It is advancing below the guise of a false ideology and pseudoscience being pushed onto our kids by way of radical activists, social media, and on-line influencers. And it is making an attempt to persuade our kids that they’re within the improper physique. I stand earlier than you as we speak to signal laws that places a cease to this in Mississippi and protects our youngsters.”

The legislation, which took fast impact, prohibits medical professionals from conducting intercourse reassignment surgical procedure, additionally referred to as gender-affirming or confirming care, and from prescribing puberty blockers or hormone replacements to anybody within the state below 18 years of age. 

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It additionally prevents public funds or tax deductions from being claimed by organizations that present the prohibited gender transition procedures, empowers the Mississippi State Board of Medical Licensure to strip medical professions of their licenses for violating the legislation, and blocks Medicaid funding from masking transgender look after minors.

Mississippi’s motion comes as social conservatives have pushed for larger oversight and restrictions on transgender medical look after minors. Lawmakers in Utah and South Dakota have enacted related bans on “gender transition procedures” for kids this yr. 

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Individuals collect in assist of transgender youth throughout a rally on the Utah State Capitol in Salt Lake Metropolis on Jan. 24, 2023. (AP Picture/Rick Bowmer)

Different states which have banned or restricted surgical look after transgender youth embrace Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona and Florida. Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas are contemplating related laws, in keeping with the Motion Development Challenge. 

Transgender activists and a few medical professionals name these legal guidelines discriminatory and say politicians are outlawing medical finest observe for gender dysphoric youth. Main medical teams together with the American Medical Affiliation have warned that restrictions on so-called gender-affirming care may hurt the psychological well being of trans youth, who’re at the next threat of suicide. 

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Individuals maintain indicators throughout a joint board assembly because the Florida Board of Drugs and the Florida Board of Osteopathic Drugs collect to determine new pointers limiting gender-affirming care in Florida on Nov. 4, 2022. (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/Orlando Sentinel/Tribune Information Service by way of Getty Photographs)

“This legislation shuts the door on medical finest observe and places politics between dad and mom, their kids, and their medical doctors,” the American Civil Liberties Union mentioned in a press release. 

“This life-saving care was already tough to entry for trans youth throughout the state, and is now completely out of attain,” the ACLU added. 

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“On the finish of the day, there are two positions right here,” Reeves mentioned Tuesday. “One tells kids that they’re lovely the way in which they’re. That they will discover happiness in their very own our bodies. The opposite tells them that they need to take medication and minimize themselves up with costly surgical procedures with the intention to discover freedom from melancholy.”

“I do know which facet I’m on,” he added. “No baby in Mississippi can have these medication or surgical procedures pushed upon them.”