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ATLANTA (LifeSiteNews) — The Georgia Senate on Monday greenlit a measure that would ban some transgender interventions for minors, forwarding the bill to Republican Gov. Brian Kemp for his signature. The move came after the Senate approved changes made to the bill by the Georgia House of Representatives.

Kemp is expected to approve the measure.

The law, SB 140, would explicitly prohibit “[s]ex reassignment surgeries, or any other surgical procedures, that are performed for the purpose of altering primary or secondary sexual characteristics” for people under the age of 18 as a treatment for “gender dysphoria.”

Georgia’s medical providers would also be banned from providing cross-sex hormones to gender-confused minors. However, the law doesn’t forbid prescription of puberty-blocking drugs.

Carve-outs are provided for children who are already taking irreversible hormones, or young people with a “medically verifiable” condition requiring intervention.

In the text of the legislation, the Georgia General Assembly provided backing for the measure by noting that “[t]here has been a massive unexplained rise in diagnoses of gender dysphoria among children over the past 10 years, with most of those experiencing this phenomenon being girls.”

READ: Gender dysphoria cases among US children tripled over five years

The lawmakers also pointed out that gender dysphoria likely coincides “with other mental health and developmental conditions, including autism spectrum disorder,” and noted that most children outgrow gender dysphoria after passing through adolescence.

Studies suggest that as many as four out of five children who experience confusion about their sex outgrow it before reaching adulthood, LifeSiteNews has previously reported.

Moreover, the lawmakers noted that interventions like sex-change surgeries and the prescription of cross-sex hormones “have permanent and irreversible effects on children,” and that available studies fail to provide evidence that people who have had such interventions as children “remain satisfied with their treatment as they aged.”

“[O]n the contrary, the General Assembly is aware of statistics showing a rising number of such individuals who, as adults, have regretted undergoing such treatment and the permanent physical harm it caused,” the Georgia legislators wrote.

After weighing the available information, the General Assembly suggested “providing counseling, and allowing the child time to mature and develop his or her own identity” rather than intervening in a manner that can cause “the child permanent physical damage.”

“The General Assembly has an obligation to protect children, whose brains and executive functioning are still developing, from undergoing unnecessary and irreversible medical treatment,” the text of the legislation reads.

READ: Georgia Senate votes to ban trans hormones, surgeries for minors while permitting puberty blockers

While most transgender surgeries in the U.S. are undertaken by adults, children who express gender confusion across the country are increasingly prescribed puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, which can have serious permanent effects, including sterility.

Moreover, some U.S. gender clinics have policies permitting certain surgical interventions, like breast removals, for adolescents. Rates of surgical mutilation for minors have spiked in recent years.

Meanwhile, Georgia is far from alone in pursuing legislation in a bid to curb the practice and protect children from irreversibly harmful transgender surgical or pharmaceutical interventions.

As LifeSiteNews has extensively reported, ongoing revelations regarding LGBT indoctrination in the classrooms and mutilating transgender medical interventions for kids have triggered a major cultural and political push to shield America’s young people from the ideological and physical dangers of transgenderism.

States that have moved to curtail transgender procedures for kids include Alabama, Tennessee, South Dakota, Mississippi, and Florida. On the flip side, however, radical left-wing state California has reacted by enacting legislation to make the Golden State a sanctuary for kids seeking transgender interventions.

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