Sex-Change Bans for Minors Surge in Conservative States

12 states ban sex changes for minors; 19 more have ongoing legislation

(L-R) Abel Garcia, who formerly identified as a transgender woman; Billboard Chris; and Chloe Cole, who formerly identified as a transgender man, take part in a demonstration against transgender treatments in Anaheim, Calif., on Oct. 8, 2022. (Brad Jones/The Epoch Times)

Lawmakers in conservative states are responding to the surge in minors who identify as transgender with legislation that bans children from having sex-change surgery.

So far, lawmakers in 12 states have banned child sex-change procedures, while nineteen more states have similar bills moving through the process.

Yet, in at least two states—California and Minnesota—lawmakers are building momentum to pass measures designed instead to make it easier for children to “transition” to another gender. The bills would allow law enforcement officers to remove children from homes where their chosen gender is not “affirmed.”

Of the 19 states eyeing a ban on so-called “gender-affirming care,” 12 have Republican-controlled legislatures, which are more likely to outlaw the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and sex-change surgeries for children seeking a new “gender identity.” 

The seven states controlled by Democrats are more likely to reject the proposed bills to halt so-called “gender-affirming care” for minors.

Three years ago, no state had a law against child sex change.

But as transgenderism has spread, lawmakers have sought to push back. Researchers estimate that about 1.4 percent of children aged 13–17 now identify as transgender.

In 2021, Arkansas became the first state to ban child sex changes. Then-Gov. Asa Hutchinson tried to block the bill that passed through the legislature, but lawmakers overrode his veto.

Hutchinson recently announced his bid for the Republican nomination in the 2024 presidential campaign.

The Arkansas law bans all gender-transition procedures for children under 18. It punishes doctors who violate the law with licensing discipline and potential damages from lawsuits that can be brought by surgical patients.

A hearing room overflows at the Indianapolis Statehouse during a discussion of a proposed ban on transgender treatments for minors, on March 21, 2023. (Courtesy of Scott Newgent/TReVoices.com)

Similar legislation has followed in 10 more states.

Idaho is the most recent state to ban child sex change, with Gov. Brad Little signing a bill into law on April 4. 

A week before that, Kentucky Republicans overrode Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear’s veto to pass their bill on March 29.

Proposed bills currently working their way through the Texas and South Carolina legislatures would ban gender-transition procedures for people under 26. North Carolina lawmakers aim to ban the procedures for anyone under 21.

Wyoming and Virginia lawmakers considered child sex-change bans, but they failed to pass.

Resisting the Lie

Parents often describe profound grief watching their children tear apart their bodies. But if they object to a child’s newly chosen “identity,” they often face separation and scorn.

Rachel is the mother of a young woman who decided to live as a boy starting in high school. Rachel’s child hasn’t hugged her in years and has chosen radical gender ideology over her family, said Rachel, who asked for anonymity.

Rachel fought for years to keep a relationship with her transgender-identifying daughter, she told The Epoch Times.

“She was just so talented,” the heartbroken mother said. “She was athletic. She was extremely smart. She was creative. She was artistic. She was musical.”

Friends, therapists, teachers, and others supported her daughter’s desire to live as a boy, Rachel said. They rapidly started referring to the girl using a boy’s name and male pronouns.

Rachel resisted. To that, her daughter once sneered, “Ask anyone in my life—I’m a man. You are the only one who doesn’t see that, which means, you’re—by definition—delusional.”

Rachel couldn’t bring herself to go along with the lie. She knew she had given birth to a daughter.

Helpless, she watched the process swallow up her child. Other mothers have described a similar process.

As a girl pursues transition to living as a male, femininity disappears, hidden under bulky masculine garb, mothers have told The Epoch Times.

Chloe Cole stands near her home in Northern California on Aug. 26, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Hair becomes boyish in style. Chest binders, meant to hide feminine curves, constrict the torso, causing labored breathing, even on an easy walk to school. Cross-sex hormones follow.

For many, surgeons step in from there with scalpels to take over the unmaking of the female body.

Rachel recalled her daughter’s continuing struggle with self-harm and suicidal thoughts. But the girl also claimed the only alternative to transgenderism was suicide.

Her daughter first used the threat of suicide to justify wearing a breast binder, Rachel said. Then, she lobbied for the next step.

“She got ahold of us and said that she really needed money because she needed a mastectomy,” Rachel said.

Chloe Cole near her home in Northern California on Aug. 26, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

She recalls her daughter saying, “You know, Mom, after a few years, you can end up with lung damage if you keep wearing” the breast binder.

“I wanted to scream,” Rachel said.

Today, Rachel’s daughter won’t speak with her. Rachel said she tried to compromise, agreeing to call her daughter by a nickname, as neutral ground between her birth name and her new male name.

“We couldn’t see her as our son,” Rachel said.

Transgender people often reject the name given by their parents. It becomes known as their “deadname.”

Who’s Affected

The massive sex-change industry affects young people the most.

About half a percent of adults say they are transgender, research from the University of California–Los Angeles suggests. Almost three times as many children identify as transgender.

In New York, 3 percent of children say they are transgender, researchers found.

In an interview with The Epoch Times, Chloe Cole shared how doctors pressured her and her parents to transition to living as a boy. At 13, she started puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. By 15, she had gotten a double mastectomy.

“They effectively guilted my parents into allowing them to do this,” said Cole, who regrets her attempt at gender transition.

A demonstrator at the Equality Florida rally at the Capitol in Tallahassee, Fla., on March 13, 2023 holds a sign that says "Free States Don't Ban Trans Health Care." (Dan M. Berger/The Epoch Times)

“They gave them the whole, ‘Either you’ll have a dead daughter or a live son' thing,” she said. “They cited suicide rates” that suggested transgender people were likely to kill themselves if not able to transition.

“There is just so much complacency on the part of educators—all the adults basically. I’m really upset over it. I feel a little bit angry. I wasn’t really allowed to just grow.”

Today, she has a low voice, no breasts, permanent skin issues on her chest, weak bones, joint pain, and potentially lost fertility, all because of transgender treatments, she says.

She doesn’t intend to try to undo what doctors did to her body.

“There are multiple options for reconstruction, but I honestly don’t think it’s worth it,” Cole said. “I will never get the function back no matter what I do, so there’s not really a point in doing it.”

Children as young as 12 have been put through what’s known as “gender-affirming” surgery, according to medical journals.

If they have regrets after pursuing sex-change treatments, boys can remove breasts that were added. But after taking female hormones, they often experience infertility and damaged sexual function.

Girls who change their minds and want to return to femininity can’t regain a female-sounding voice. The potential success of surgery to remove an added male appendage has been widely disputed.

Yet, left untreated for their gender dysphoria, about 80 percent of children affected by those feelings eventually outgrow the condition, according to a 2013 medical study of 127 children.

Chloe Cole holds testosterone medication used for transgender patients in Northern California on Aug. 26, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Effects of ‘Gender-Affirming’ Drugs

Puberty blockers prevent brain and bone growth, leaving children with diminished intelligence and early-onset osteoporosis, studies have shown. In the past, the medications were used to delay puberty when young children started maturing unusually early.

Recently, doctors have prescribed them to physically healthy children who want to avoid puberty because they identify as transgender. The next step for these children often is opposite-sex hormones.

Girls who want to resemble boys take testosterone in the forms of pills, patches, or injections. These drugs can cost up to $100 a month, and quickly cause permanent physical changes.

The male hormone permanently deepens a female’s voice. She begins to grow body hair like a boy. Her chest broadens, her jaw sharpens, and part of her lower sexual anatomy enlarges.

When a girl takes testosterone it also can cause high cholesterol, heart disease, diabetes, blood clots, infertility, joint pain, and many other health issues.

When boys take estrogen to increase feminine characteristics, the hormone causes breasts to grow and testicles to shrink. Body and facial hair diminish, and body fat increases. Sexual function also declines.

Boosting estrogen levels in men often can create blood clots, infertility, strokes, diabetes, high blood pressure, joint pain, and weight gain.

The earlier children start sex-change hormones, while blocking their natural hormones, the more likely they are to resemble the gender of their choice, the Mayo Clinic advises. Experts there also say cross-sex hormones have many permanent effects.

Follow the Science

Short-term studies on child sex-change treatments have mixed results. Media outlets and pro-transgender medical websites widely market the procedures and treatments as reversible. There are no long-term studies on the effects on children.

Yet, a growing cadre of “detransitioners”—people who regret their sex-change treatments and procedures—are speaking out around the world, pleading with anyone who will listen about the dangers of that path. They passionately insist that damage to health and fertility, caused by “gender-affirming care,” is real and absolutely irreversible.

Meanwhile, the transgender movement grows.

The sex-change industry currently provides $1.9 billion a year in treatments to patients, according to market analysis by Grand View Research.

Scott Newgent shows scarring left behind after surgery to create, from arm issue, part of the male anatomy as part of a transition to live more like a man.  (Courtesy of Scott Newgent)

Paid lobbyists seek to persuade lawmakers to protect the business of selling hormone treatment, breast removal, castration, and the creation of not-quite-functional sex organs.

And a host of medical practices and hospitals around the country are eager to help females who hope to look more like males. 

Medical practices and hospitals also offer these “trans men” a wide range of surgeries, including double-mastectomies to flatten the chest, and the creation of a male appendage crafted from a patient’s carved-up arm tissue.

Doctors also offer hormones to men who want to look like ladies. These “trans women” also may choose amputation to remove unwanted male organs. Other surgeries can give them breasts and other likenesses of female parts.

Surgeons now are inventing procedures to remove a uterus from a woman seeking to be more like a man and transplant it into a man hoping to live more like a woman.

The procedure’s end goal is for any man who calls himself a woman to experience carrying a baby. But without female anatomy, the infant could only be delivered by Cesarean section, surgeons involved in the planning have said.

Grave Decisions

Transgender activists vehemently oppose laws restricting gender-affirming care. They argue that many children will commit suicide if they can’t get a sex change.

The position of the Human Rights Campaign is that “when kids are allowed the freedom to safely express themselves, they are happier, healthier, and grow into thriving adults.”

Conflicting research suggests that those who undergo sex-change surgery actually are more likely to commit suicide eventually.

The ability of children to understand the gravity of sex-change decisions also has come into question.

Transgender patients increasingly are children, even pre-teens. Many experts worry that children are too immature to make decisions that will affect their health forever.

A 12-year-old girl who wants to be a boy can reject female puberty with medication. The male hormones she takes might mean she will never resemble a woman or have normal fertility, even if she changes her mind. And surgeries make the decision even more difficult—if not impossible—to reverse.

A child of that age can’t understand what she might be giving up, such as normal sexual function, pregnancy, and breastfeeding, experts worry.

And she needs to understand that she'll never fully experience being a man.

Scott Newgent went through sex-change surgery in an attempt to live as a man. But the appendage that surgeons created doesn’t work. It constantly leaks urine and becomes badly infected and painful.

The donor site for the surgery has left Newgent with a painful, badly scarred arm. Newgent’s candid blog sketches out other brutal realities of life after sex-change surgery.

But Newgent speaks about the impossibility of returning to life as a woman, and wants to warn others that surgeon-crafted sex organs don’t function like the real thing.

Scott Newgent, who regrets transitioning from feminine to masculine, prepares to testify at the Nebraska Statehouse on Feb. 8, 2023, in support of a bill that would outlaw the procedures. (Courtesy of Scott Newgent/TReVoices.org)

Billions in Play

By 2030, transgenderism likely will be an industry worth $4.9 billion annually, market analysis firm Grand View Research predicts. Today, sex-change procedures for women alone are a $1.15 billion industry.

“The female-to-male sex reassignment surgery is increasing, owing to continuous innovations in metoidioplasty, phalloplasty, scrotoplasty, and chest reconstructing,” the report reads.

Beyond genital removal or creation, more subtle differences can be pursued, as well.

A surgeon’s scalpel can remove or create the appearance of an Adam’s apple. It can augment cheekbones and chins, contour the forehead, reduce or build up a jawline, restructure a nose.

Body fat can be reduced in some areas, and added to others. The buttocks can be sculpted. Hair can be permanently removed. Cost of a full course of surgeries can top $300,000.

But the costs continue.

Fairfax County mother Stacy Langton (L) protests the school district's pro-transgender policies and "gender-affirming care" outside a Fairfax County School Board meeting in Falls Church, Va., on Nov. 3, 2022. (Terri Wu/The Epoch Times)

Maintaining the appearance of change from age 14 to 85 requires an expenditure of about $85,000, even without complications.

So sex-change providers have good reason to expand business across the country, Grand View Research notes.

Top sex-change surgery providers include the Mount Sinai Health System, the Transgender Surgery Institute,  Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Moein Surgical Arts, Boston Medical Center, the Cleveland Clinic, CNY Cosmetic & Reconstructive Surgery, the Plastic Surgery Group of Rochester, the University of Michigan Health System, and Johns Hopkins University.

These companies stand poised to reap massive benefits because they have few market competitors, Grand View Research reports.

Providers can thank corporate media and social media for portraying transgenderism as a large and normal part of society. Increased public awareness of transgenderism is one of the biggest reasons for the market boom, and it’s only getting better for providers, the report suggests.

The ‘Coolest’ Cuts

Culturally, transgenderism has become an enticing trend for children. Taking on a new gender identity is often praised as being cool. Many school systems have eagerly encouraged transgenderism for children “as early as 2, 3 years of age.”

In Maine, a school counselor encouraged a 13-year-old girl to gender transition and secretly bought her a breast binder. An increasing number of books in school programs expose children to transgenderism and explicit sexual content at ages as young as kindergarten.

Flags are displayed at Transgender Day of Remembrance at Uptown Theater in Richland, Wash., on Nov. 20, 2021. (Courtesy of PFLAG Benton Franklin)

The American calendar has 112 days devoted to transgenderism, including LGBT Pride Month, the Transgender Day of Visibility, National LGBTQ+ Health Awareness Week, Transgender Flag Day, National Transgender Children Day, Trans Youth Day, and the International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia.

After a transgender shooter recently killed six people at a Nashville, Tennessee, Christian school, pop star Madonna announced on Instagram that she would host a benefit concert, but not for the families of victims.

Instead, Madonna announced, it will “celebrate Drag and the Trans community!”

Paying the Tab

The Biden administration also backs child sex change and calls laws against it “discriminatory.” 

“As kids, they deserve what every child deserves: the chance to learn in safe and supportive schools, to develop meaningful friendships, and to live openly and honestly,” a White House proclamation states. 

“But today, too many transgender Americans are still denied those rights and freedoms. A wave of discriminatory state laws is targeting transgender youth, terrifying families, and hurting kids who are not hurting anyone.”

Federal support for sex change bolsters the billion-dollar transgenderism industry, the Grand View Research report states.

And taxpayers are footing the bill.

A transgender children's book in Irvine, Calif., on Aug. 30, 2022. (John Fredricks/The Epoch Times)

Although Medicare mostly provides taxpayer-funded insurance for those over 65, it also provides insurance to young people with disabilities. Now, Medicare pays for cross-sex hormones and sex-change surgeries, the report notes.

President Joe Biden’s administration outlawed “discrimination” against transgender individuals in health care and now, many insurers also cover sex-change surgery.

However, the industry currently is threatened by the “hundreds of measures restricting the rights of transgender individuals,” the report notes. It adds, “The treatment of gender dysphoria in adolescents and younger individuals is especially controversial.”

If the 12 Republican-controlled state legislatures across America successfully pass their proposed bills against child sex-change this year, the transgender industry will lose access to about 35 million children.

But even more children live in states that don’t have proposed legislation to halt sex change for minors.

Brad Jones contributed to this report.