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NASHVILLE (LifeSiteNews) – The Tennessee Senate voted 26-6 Monday to pass legislation prohibiting the surgical or chemical “transitioning” of minors in the Volunteer State.

The Protecting Children from Gender Mutilation Act prohibits doctors from prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones or performing gender-related surgeries on minors for the purpose of “gender transition,” as well as allow patients and their families to sue a health practitioner for knowingly violating the law, and enable minors to bring a civil cause of action against parents who helped facilitate their “medical transition.”

It makes exceptions only for those rare cases where hormones and/or surgery are necessary to treat genuine chromosomal anomalies or congenital defects that result in developmental sex conditions.

WJHL reports that the Act won final passage on a party-line vote Monday and now moves on to the state House for consideration, starting with a House Civil Justice Committee hearing on Wednesday. 

The bill was inspired in large part by a Daily Wire report last September revealing videos in which Vanderbilt University Medical Center personnel promote transitioning minors as financially lucrative and express hostility toward medical professionals with ethical reservations to the practice.

“These surgeries make a lot of money,” says Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor, a physician with VUMC’s Clinic for Transgender Health, noting that “chest reconstruction” can mean $40,000 per patient, and vaginoplasties well over $20,000. “These surgeries are labor intensive, there are a lot of follow-ups, they require a lot of our time, and they make money.”

The public outcry following the report led VUMC to “pause” all gender surgeries on minors the following month, and now lawmakers are working on more comprehensively ending the practice in Tennessee. 

The far-left American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) says it will sue if the Protecting Children from Gender Mutilation Act is signed into law.

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