Florida Governor Ron DeSantis reportedly said he is "very much opposed" to trans surgery, which he calls "chemical castration."
CNSNews said DeSantis firmly announced in an interview with Daily Caller News Foundation that he would even go to sign a bill that prohibits that procedure if he was given the opportunity to. Mary Olohan, the Daily Caller News Foundation host, asked DeSantis during the interview if the state would be banning trans surgery for minors through a legislation since legislators previously tried to introduce one.
"Oh, I'm very much opposed to chemical castration of minors. I mean, I think that that's a really, really--I mean, honestly I didn't even know that this existed until a few years ago. So, that would be something I would sign, for sure," DeSantis said.
As per CNSNews, Florida's legislators failed to pass the legislation that bans transgender surgery to be performed on minors but it did not pass the scrutiny of the Professions & Public Health Subcommittee.
The said legislation, House Bill 935 or the Youth Gender and Sexual Identity Act, creates the Vulnerable Child Protection Act for Florida. More than anything, the bill lays down for health care practitioners the limitations they can perform on minors when it comes to sex change surgeries.
"A health care practitioner who performs any of the following practices upon a minor, or who cause such practiced to be performed upon a minor, for the purpose of attempting to change the minor's sex or for the purpose of affirming the minor's perception of the minor's sex if that perception is inconsistent with the minor's sex, commits a misdemeanor of the first degree," the bill's literature said.
House Bill 935 identified surgeries such as "castration, vasectomy, hysterectomy, oophorectomy, metoidioplasty, orchiectomy, penectomy, phalloplasty, and vaginoplasty," including "mastectomy" as those prohibited to be conducted on minors. Prescribing puberty blockers, as well as "supraphysiologic doses of testosterone to females" and "estrogen to males" were also prohibited in the bill.
The bill, however, exempts surgeries approved by parents in "good faith" to medically address a genetic disorder of their child "such as being born with having 46 XX chromosomes with virilization, 46 XY chromosomes with undervirilization, or both ovarian and testicular tissue."
Unlike the Youth Gender and Sexual Identity Act, DeSantis was able to sign the Fairness in Women's Sports Act just last week to protect women athletes from biological males who join women's sports.
The Fairness In Women's Sports Act or House Bill 1475 passed the Florida Senate in a 77-70 vote last April. The bill promotes sex equality by requiring the designation of separate sex-specific athletic teams or sports."
DeSantis said banning biological males or transgender women from participating in women's sports is meant "to protect fairness" so that girls are going to play girls' sports and boys are going to play boys' sports" on a "level playing field."
Florida's efforts, along with other states who ban biological males from participating in female sports, ironically received criticism from President Joe Biden on Wednesday for their "discriminatory bills" that allegedly "defy our Nation's values of inclusivity and freedom for all."
This is despite former transgender people have already voiced out the need to make it difficult to transition between genders after realizing the irreversible mistakes they made.
