WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) introduced a bill on Wednesday that would empower Americans who were harmed by “gender transition” procedures as minors to sue those responsible for damages, following an executive order by President Donald Trump calling for such legislation.
Named after a whistleblower who exposed the practices of St. Louis Children’s Hospital’s gender program in 2023, the Jamie Reed Protecting Our Kids from Child Abuse Act would establish that anyone who “suffers bodily injury or harm to mental health that is attributable, in whole or in part, to a gender-transition procedure provided to the individual when the individual was a minor” may “bring a civil action against an individual or entity” responsible for compensation and damages (plus attorney fees), up to 30 years after turning 18.
The bill also prohibits federal funding for any “pediatric gender clinic,” “institution of higher education or hospital that hosts, operates, partners with, provides funding to, or is otherwise affiliated with, a pediatric gender clinic”; or “for any gender-transition procedure performed on a minor.”
The bill follows an executive order that Trump signed on Tuesday to end all federal support for “transition” procedures on minors, rescind or amend all of the Biden health bureaucracy’s past endorsements of underage “transitioning,” review the medical literature on the subject, enforce all existing restrictions on underage “transitioning,” and take regulatory action to “end” the practice to the greatest extent possible under current law.
That order also called on Congress to work with the Department of Justice to “draft, propose, and promote legislation to enact a private right of action for children and the parents of children whose healthy body parts have been damaged by medical professionals practicing chemical and surgical mutilation, which should include a lengthy statute of limitations”; which Hawley’s bill does.
“Our children should no longer suffer from irreversible and dangerous child mutilation procedures, which the Biden administration enabled and promoted,” Hawley said. “I welcome President Trump’s strong action to reverse this child abuse and look forward to working with his administration to advance legislation that protects our kids.”
A significant body of evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them, or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically transformative, and often irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80 percent of children suffering gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence and that “transition” procedures fail to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide – and even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
Many oft-ignored “detransitioners,” individuals who attempted to live under a different “gender identity” before embracing their sex, attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion in favor of “transitioning.”
“Gender-affirming” physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with an 2022 exposé about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”