LINCOLN, Nebraska (LifeSiteNews) — A ban on mutilating transgender surgeries for minors and emergency regulations restricting access to transgender drugs took effect Sunday, adding to a growing list of statewide regulations to protect children from permanent physical and psychological damage.
Legislative Bill 574, which was approved by Nebraska lawmakers and signed by Nebraska Republican Gov. Jim Pillen in May, took effect Sunday and prohibits transgender surgeries for minors like mastectomies and genital surgeries for gender-confused kids, and also protects preborn babies from elective abortions at 12 weeks’ gestation.
READ: Nebraska governor signs law restricting trans mutilation of children, abortion after 12 weeks
Under the legislation, Nebraska chief medical officer, Dr. Timothy Tesmer, was ordered to issue regulations on the use of transgender drugs, LifeSiteNews reported at the time.
According to the language of the law, healthcare professionals must be allowed to “prescribe approved puberty-blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones, or both to an individual younger than 19 years of age if such individual has a long-lasting and intense pattern of gender nonconformity or gender dysphoria which began or worsened at the start of puberty” under certain conditions.
Tesmer was accordingly tasked with establishing a “minimum number of gender-identity-focused therapeutic hours” and a minimum waiting period before a minor can undergo transgender drugs, as well as informed consent requirements.
Under the new regulations announced by the state Department of Health and Human Services, minors seeking transgender drugs must now submit to 40 hours of “clinically neutral” therapy in order to be approved, the Associated Press reported.
As LifeSiteNews has extensively reported, in addition to asserting a false reality that one’s sex can be changed, transgender surgeries and drugs have been linked to permanent physical and psychological damage, including cardiovascular diseases, loss of bone density, cancer, strokes and blood clots, infertility, and suicidality.
Regardless, transgender identification among children has spiked in recent years and the rates of surgical mutilation for minors have risen astronomically. The phenomenon has coincided with young children across the country being actively encouraged in their classrooms to adopt “transgender,” “gender-fluid,” or “non-binary” identities.
Many Republican-led states have reacted by implementing bans or restrictions on the mutilating interventions for kids.
Just last month, LifeSite reported, physicians at Washington University’s Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital in Missouri were forced to stop distributing harmful puberty blockers and sterilizing cross-sex hormones after the state’s Republican governor signed a bill banning the drugs for children.
READ: Missouri hospital stops giving children transgender hormones after new law takes effect
But while states like Missouri and Nebraska have moved to protect kids, some Democrat-led states have moved in the opposite direction. In Maine, the governor recently signed a law permitting cross-sex hormones for children even without parental consent.