Marjorie Taylor Greene pledges bill to criminalize gender-affirming care in CPAC speech

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) announced during a speech Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference that she wants to criminalize gender-affirming care for minors.

Greene said at the major Republican gathering that she plans to introduce in the House of Representatives the Protect Children’s Innocence Act, which she said would criminalize the provision of gender-affirming care to minors. Greene introduced a version of the bill in the last Congress, but it was not brought up for a vote by the Democratic majority in the House.

“Let me tell you my great news this morning, ladies and gentlemen. It couldn’t pass last Congress because, like I said, Nancy Pelosi was the speaker of the House, and she doesn’t believe in gender at all. But we have a new speaker in our Republican majority in the House of Representatives, and I’m going to be introducing my bill, the Protect Children’s Innocence Act, that will make it a felony to perform anything to do with gender-affirming care on children,” Greene said.

The official published summary of the previous version of Greene’s bill said:

[T]he bill makes it a felony to perform any gender affirming care on a minor and it permits a minor on whom such care is performed to bring a civil action against each individual who provided the care.

 

Additionally, the bill prohibits the use of federal funds for gender affirming care or for health insurance that covers such care. Such care may not be provided in a federal health care facility or by a federal employee. The bill also prohibits qualified health plans from including coverage for gender affirming care. Further, plans that include coverage for such care are not eligible for federal subsidies.

 

Finally, the bill prohibits institutions of higher education from offering instruction in gender affirming care. It also makes any non-U.S. national (alien under federal law) who performs gender affirming care on a minor deportable and inadmissible to the United States.

Greene’s bill is part of an array of GOP legislation targeting transgender children and adults.

Republican-controlled states across the country have passed laws that do everything from banning gender-affirming care for both minors and adults to prohibiting transgender girls from playing sports on the teams that correspond to their gender to criminalizing drag performances.

Health care groups have come out against the anti-trans legislation and say gender-affirming care is life-saving.

In 2018, the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a statement that said: “The AAP recommends taking a ‘gender-affirming,’ nonjudgmental approach that helps children feel safe in a society that too often marginalizes or stigmatizes those seen as different. The gender-affirming model strengthens family resiliency and takes the emphasis off heightened concerns over gender while allowing children the freedom to focus on academics, relationship-building and other typical developmental tasks.”

It’s unclear whether House Speaker Kevin McCarthy would put Greene’s bill up for a vote, but he has backed other anti-transgender legislation in the past.

On Feb. 1, McCarthy joined Greene for a roundtable on Capitol Hill about allowing transgender girls to play women’s sports and said he supports legislation introduced by House Republicans that would ban their participation. Reading from a statement by Republican Rep. Greg Steube of Florida, McCarthy said: “As I’ve said many times, it’s a sad day in America when we have to introduce a bill to say that men will play on men’s teams and women will play on women’s teams. But we’ve seen time and time again how the left only favors fairness when aligns with their woke agenda.”

Transgender adults and parents of transgender children have decried the legislation as cruel and worrisome.

“When you have health care professionals who are working with you, who have gotten to know you, who have been talking about plans months and years out, understanding what that is going to look like, and helping you to plan that road ahead, to know what it is that you’re looking towards, to think that you could then lose that, and that the government could be telling you that they know better than this entire team of people to stop you from accessing lifesaving medical care — that, in and of itself, is terrifying,” Rori Picker Neiss, the parent of a transgender son, told PBS NewsHour in a segment broadcast on March 1.

Daniel Bogard, a rabbi in Missouri who is the parent of a 9-year-old transgender son, told the Washington Post, “Our state is at war with our family,” with GOP lawmakers in the state introducing dozens of anti-trans bills.

“It’s not an exaggeration that we are up at night talking about when and how far we might have to flee,” Bogard said.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.