Healthcare Watchdog Crafts ‘Bill of Rights’ for Youths Escaping Transgenderism

Pastor Staci Imes, of Woodland Park Presbyterian Church, finishes putting sunscreen on Gus
AP Photo/Lindsey Wasson
Katherine Hamilton

A medical watchdog organization has launched a “Detransitioner Bill of Rights” — model legislation aimed at supporting people who seek to detransition from experimental sex change drugs and procedures they received as minors.

Do No Harm, a medical organization dedicated to opposing woke gender and racial ideologies in medicine, announced the model legislation last week, calling it “groundbreaking,” and the “first-of-its-kind.” 

“The Detransitioner Bill of Rights represents a crucial step in protecting the rights and well-being of children who have been subjected to experimental sex change treatments,” said Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, Do No Harm chairman. “Medical professionals should publicly acknowledge the plight of detransitioners and research ways to help and support those who regret undergoing these procedures.”

The model legislation has been made available to all, including state and federal policymakers, and advocates for six “fundamental rights” of detransitioners including: 

  • Right to Informed Consent
  • Right to Effective Care
  • Right to Public Transparency
  • Right to Insurance Coverage
  • Right to Legal Restoration
  • Right to Justice

The model legislation has been heralded by high-profile detransitioners, including Chloe Cole, who said she helped inform the content on the bill based on her own experiences.

“I was abused and lied to by the medical professionals I was told to trust. They lied to my parents, too. They’re still abusing and lying to countless young boys and girls,” Cole wrote in an op-ed for Fox News Digital.

“Our bill ensures that every medical professional who helps a minor transition can be held personally liable for the damage they do. I know many people who waited a lot longer than I did to detransition. Our bill lets them sue their doctors for up to 25 years after they turn 18,” she wrote. “The transgender craze is sweeping the country. It’s only a matter of time before the wave of detransitioners swells, too. Every state should pass this ‘detransitioner bill of rights’ to ensure that people like me get honesty, care and justice.”

Detransitioner Bill of Rights by Breitbart News on Scribd

Breaking Down the Bill

In the United States, the top-down push for minors to obtain sex-mutilating drugs and surgeries under the misleading moniker “gender-affirming care” is clear, promulgated by President Joe Biden’s White House, academia, large hospitals, and major medical organizations.

At the root, these actors, along with the proliferation of gender ideology on social media, ultimately promote the false idea that human beings can be a different sex than what they were born as. Even further, the gender ideology complex claims these individuals should take sex-change drugs and get sex-change procedures to align their outward appearance with how they feel on the inside.

Some of these so-called treatments include double mastectomies, female and male genital mutilation and removal, facial feminization and masculinization, hormone treatments, and puberty blockers that can cause chemical sterilization.

While the push toward transgenderism is heavily ideological, a report released in December 2020 found that the U.S. sex reassignment surgery market size was valued at $267 million in 2019 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 14.4 percent from 2020 to 2027.

Do No Harm concluded in its legislative findings that the United States is barreling forward with sexually mutilating sex-confused children, even while health authorities in Sweden, Finland, and the U.K. are backtracking, “having found no reliable evidence that the benefits of these physiological interventions outweigh the risks.”

“They now recommend psychotherapy as a first, and ideally only, line of treatment for youth with gender dysphoria,” the model text reads. 

“Despite the course reversal underway in Europe, some in the American medical community are aggressively pushing for interventions on minors that medically alter the minor’s hormonal balance and remove healthy external and internal sex organs,” the text continues. “Organizations that advocate for such interventions, including the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), do so for ideological rather than scientific or medical reasons and actively stifle dissent in the medical community.”

Do No Harm argues that as institutions in the United States continue to push for minors to access sex-change drugs and procedures, there has been a rising number of detransitioners, some of whom “indicate that they were pressured to medically transition in the first place.” At the same time, the organization found that there is very little established support for those seeking to exit transgenderism. 

“Many of these individuals regret the decision to transition and regret the physical harm the interventions caused. Many individuals do not detransition or express regret until adulthood. The total percentage of people who experience this regret is unknown,” the text states, adding that detransitioners were “subjected to an experimental course of treatment to alter their bodies…” and were not necessarily exposed to the risks of sex-change drugs and procedures. 

Right to Informed Consent

Under the model bill, no healthcare professional could prescribe sex-change drugs or perform sex-change procedures on minors unless they obtain informed consent from the minor and the minor’s legal guardian. The text contains a private cause of action for parents and minors against healthcare professionals who violate the rule. Healthcare professionals in violation could also lose their licenses after review by disciplinary boards.

Informed consent under the bill includes both the verbal and written notice to a patient during every medical visit for at least 12 months on the risks of the procedures, including:

(1) No reliable studies have shown that these treatments reduce the risk of suicide in children or adolescents with gender dysphoria.

(2) The Federal Food & Drug Administration has not approved the use of puberty blockers or crosssex hormones for the purpose of treating gender dysphoria or gender incongruence. In other words, using these medications to treat gender dysphoria or gender incongruence is considered “off-label” use because they are not being used for their approved purpose.

(3) European governments, including the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Finland, have studied these treatments and have concluded there is no reliable evidence showing that the potential benefits of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for this purpose outweigh the risks. Those governments instead recommend psychotherapy as the first line of treatment for children and adolescents with gender dysphoria.

(4) The use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for this purpose increases the risk of your child or adolescent being sterilized, meaning that he or she will never be able to have children.

(5) The use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for this purpose carry numerous other risks of physical harm, including severely decreased bone density, heart disease, stroke, and cancer.

(6) The effect of these treatments on the brain development of your child or adolescent is entirely unknown. 

The legislation would also prohibit healthcare professionals from denying parents access to their child’s medical records, save for evidence of abuse, neglect, domestic violence, or other safety concerns.  

Right to Effective Care

The text would ban cities, municipalities, and localities from prohibiting mental health therapy that helps sex-confused minors “address an inconsistency between the minor’s sex and the minor’s perceived gender or perceived sex.”

“No city, municipality, or locality may prohibit a parent or legal guardian from consenting to, or withholding consent from, the provision of mental-health therapy to help a minor address an inconsistency between the minor’s sex and the minor’s perceived gender or perceived sex,” the text continues. 

This section is notable, given that in places around the United States, left-wing activists are pushing for a ban on any kind of therapy that questions “gender-affirming care” by lumping it under the umbrella of “conversion therapy.”

Right to Public Transparency

Under the legislation, gender clinics would be required to provide a report with de-identified information about transition procedures, including, but not limited to, the age of the person undergoing the procedure, as well as a description of “any other neurological, behavioral, or mental health conditions that the person has been diagnosed with or exhibits symptoms of, including Autism Spectrum Disorder, depression, anxiety, or bi-polar disorder.”

Right to Insurance Coverage

The model legislation states that any gender clinic using state funds to pay for sex-change procedures, as a condition of receiving funds, must “agree to provide or pay for the performance of detransition procedures.”

“If any insurance policy includes coverage for gender transition procedures, the policy must also include coverage for detransition procedures,” the text reads. “Any entity providing insurance coverage for detransition procedures must provide statistics in a form created by [State Health Agency] regarding insurance claims for detransition procedures in the State.”

Right to Legal Restoration

Within 30 days of the effective date of the bill, the acting agency would develop an expedited process for changing the sex, name, pronouns, and other information recorded on birth certificates, driver’s licenses, or other legal documents to match biological reality after previously being changed to match a transgender identity.  

Right to Justice

The legislation states that any health care professional or doctor who performs a sex-change procedure on a minor would be “strictly and personally liable for all costs associated with subsequent detransition procedures sought by the minor within 25 years after the commencement of a gender transition procedure.”

The text also enables detransitioners to bring civil action, either within 25 years from the day they reach 18 years old or within four years from the time the cost of the detransition procedure in incurred (whichever day is later), against the healthcare professional who performed the sex-change procedure to pay for detransition procedures or if they suffered injury. 

“Any healthcare professional or physician who provides a minor with a gender transition procedure is strictly liable to that minor if the treatment or the after-effects of such treatment, including a subsequent detransition procedure, results in any injury, including physical, psychological, emotional, or physiological harms, within the next 25 years,” the text states. 

Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on X @thekat_hamilton.

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