The U.S. House of Representatives has approved legislation that would prohibit gender transition procedures for minors, though the bill is expected to face significant resistance in the narrowly divided U.S. Senate.
Lawmakers in the Republican-led House voted 216–211 on Wednesday to pass the Protect Children’s Innocence Act, advancing one of the most sweeping federal efforts to restrict medical interventions related to gender identity for children.
Under the legislation, any individual who “knowingly performs, or attempts to perform genital or body mutilation on another person, who is a minor” could face financial penalties and up to 10 years in prison. The same criminal liability would extend to anyone who assists in carrying out such procedures.
The bill not only bans surgical interventions that remove healthy body parts or create artificial ones to match a person’s declared gender identity, but also prohibits “chemical castration,” including the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones on minors.
For the measure to become law, it must clear the Senate and be sent to Donald Trump for his signature. Although Republicans control 53 of the Senate’s 100 seats, most legislation requires 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. With at least seven Senate Democrats unlikely to support the bill, its prospects in the upper chamber remain uncertain.
The House vote comes as a growing number of states move independently to restrict such medical practices. To date, 27 states have enacted laws banning some or all gender transition procedures for minors, citing concerns about long-term physical and psychological consequences.
Medical risks associated with these interventions were underscored by the American College of Pediatricians, which has warned that puberty blockers may lead to “osteoporosis, mood disorders, seizures, cognitive impairment, and, when combined with cross-sex hormones, sterility.” The group also notes that cross-sex hormones can raise the lifetime risk of “heart attacks, stroke, diabetes, blood clots and cancers.”
Those concerns were echoed during a press conference hosted Thursday by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where detransitioner Chloe Cole described the lasting emotional and physical toll of undergoing gender transition procedures as a minor.
Because she had her breasts removed as a teenager, Cole said she will never be able to breastfeed a child and condemned such surgeries as “unscientific medical abuse that violates every tenet of medical ethics.”
“This ideology is festering at an unimaginable scale within our hospital systems, our culture, our communities and too many within our own families,” she said. “There are tears that I don’t show the world.”
“There’s grief, every single day, I carry with me silently,” Cole added. “The only thing in the world that makes me angry is knowing that this is continuing to happen to children all across the United States and throughout the globe.”
At Thursday’s press conference, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of Health and Human Services, announced that his department has submitted a proposed rule that would cut off federal funding to hospitals that perform gender transition procedures on minors.
