South Carolina’s Republican governor has signed a “Help Not Harm” law that shields children and teenagers from risky transgender medical procedures.

The law signed by Gov. Henry McMaster marks the expanding and popular movement to protect kids from hormones, drugs, surgeries, and other irreversible treatments that supposedly “affirm” teenagers’ internal and unmeasurable sense of “gender.”

The law also ensures that parents must be told by teachers if their K-12 children are experimenting with transgender themes, such as opposite-sex pronouns. The law goes into effect immediately.

The bill only protects children. “If they want to make those decisions later when they’re adults, then that’s a different story, but we must protect our young people from irreversible [medical] decisions,” McMaster said.

Republican governors in two other states — Louisiana and New Hampshire — also are expected to sign bills that protect minors from the Democrats’ transgender agenda.

Establishment media outlets portrayed South Carolina’s shield law as a “ban” and a violation of human rights.

“South Carolina governor signs into law ban on gender-affirming care for transgender minors,” the Associated Press (AP) declared. The AP article used transgender jargon, including the phrase “sex assigned at birth.”

“South Carolina Bans Gender Transition Care for Minors,” claimed the New York Times, adding:

South Carolina’s Republican governor, Henry McMaster, signed a bill on Tuesday that bars health professionals from performing gender-transition surgeries, prescribing puberty blocking drugs and overseeing hormone treatments for patients under 18.

…

Mr. [Jace] Woodrum, who is the first transgender director of an A.C.L.U. state chapter, said that his organization was weighing a lawsuit over the South Carolina ban. Other groups that support transgender rights have said that they would immediately try to help families with grants and other financial support to travel to other states for care.

However, there is a growing consensus that transgender treatments are high-risk, irreversible, and unfair to other Americans who benefit from laws that recognize the biological differences and needs of the two equal and complementary sexes.

For example, a federal study of 1,501 transgender cases over 20 years showed adults who undergo “gender-affirming” surgery experience a 12.12 percent rise in the risk of suicide attempts.

Three and a half percent of 1,501 people — or seven victims for every 200 people — who have undergone “gender-affirming” surgery are at risk of committing suicide compared to 0.30 percent of every 15,608,363 people — or one in every 330 people — who have not undergone “gender-affirming” surgery. The large study also noted that people who undergo “gender-affirming” surgery are 3.35 percent more likely to die, 9.88 percent more likely to experience suicide/self-harm, and 7.76 percent more likely to experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than those with no history of “gender-affirming” surgery.

In the United Kingdom, however, the government-commissioned Cass report has completely changed the government policy towards transgenderism by revealing the danger of “transgender” treatments on children and adults.

“Hilary Cass is the kind of hero the world needs today,” wrote David Brooks, an op-ed columnist at the New York Times:

She writes in her report, “The option to provide masculinizing/feminizing hormones from age 16 is available, but the review would recommend extreme caution.” She does not issue a blanket, one-size-fits-all recommendation, but her core conclusion is this: “For most young people, a medical pathway will not be the best way to manage their gender-related distress.”

However, the American transgender industry is rejecting the U.K. report. For example, the society for doctors who deal with hormones — the Endocrine Society — declared:

We stand firm in our support of gender-affirming care. Transgender and gender-diverse people deserve access to needed and often life-saving medical care. NHS England’s recent report, the Cass Review, does not contain any new research that would contradict the recommendations made in our Clinical Practice Guideline on gender-affirming care.

The guideline, which cites more than 260 research studies, recommends a very conservative approach to care, with no medical intervention prior to puberty. Estimates indicate only a fraction of transgender and gender-diverse adolescents opt to take puberty-delaying medications, which have been used to treat early puberty in youth for four decade

President Joe Biden’s deputies are accelerating their enforcement of the very unpopular transgender ideology in the nation’s schools and hospitals.