(Washington) The American House of Representatives adopted on Wednesday a bill against the “bodily mutilation” of minors and which thus bans transition treatment for transgender minors, a text decried by associations defending LGBT+ rights.
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The text, carried by radical right-wing elected official Marjorie Taylor Greene, was approved with 216 votes for and 211 against, and is now heading to the Senate.
“This important bill (…) will put an end to genital mutilation and chemical castration of children,” Marjorie Taylor Greene declared Wednesday from the chamber of the House of Representatives.
Its text lists a series of operations prohibited if they are “performed with the aim of changing the body (of a minor) in order to make it correspond to a sex which differs from their biological sex”.
Offenders, “any person who performs or attempts to perform” such acts on minors or who transports a minor for this purpose, could risk up to 10 years in prison.
This text is “a direct reflection of President Trump’s executive order and the campaign promises of every Republican in 2024,” added Marjorie Taylor Greene.
PHOTO EVELYN HOCKSTEIN, REUTERS
Marjorie Taylor Greene
Since his return to power, Donald Trump has returned to a series of achievements obtained by transgender people.
The Republican president thus ordered the exclusion of transgender people from the armed forces and authorized federal agencies to cut subsidies to schools that allow transgender athletes to compete in women’s championships.
Democrat Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender elected official in the history of the American Congress, denounced the text.
“The only thing that matters to Republican politicians is making the rich richer and attacking trans people,” she told the press on the steps of the Capitol on Wednesday.
For A4TE, an association defending the rights of transgender people, “Marjorie Taylor Greene’s text attempts to take away both transgender people and intersex people their freedoms to make decisions about their own bodies.”
The association underlines in a press release that the proposed law includes an exception for surgical operations on intersex children, born with both feminine and masculine attributes.
The proposed law “criminalizes treatments that trans young people, their families, their doctors, and virtually every legitimate professional association consider necessary, safe, and beneficial, while explicitly supporting irreversible and non-consensual operations on intersex children,” denounced Sinead Murano-Kinney of A4TE in the press release.
