Tennessee Lawmakers Pass Bill to Criminalize Adults Who Help Minors Obtain Gender-Transition Services

Tennessee state legislators passed a measure on Thursday that would criminalize adults who help minors access gender-transition services without parental consent.

The legislation would penalize any “adult who recruits, harbors, or transports an unemancipated minor” in Tennessee “for the purpose of receiving a prohibited medical procedure that is for the purpose of enabling the minor to identify with, or live as, a purported identity inconsistent with the minor’s sex or treating purported discomfort or distress from a discordance between the minor’s sex and asserted identity, regardless of where the medical procedure is to be procured.”

Violations would be charged as a Class C felony. Individuals found guilty of breaking the law could face three to 15 years of prison time and fines of up to $10,000. The measure also “authorizes a person who violates this amendment to be held liable in a civil action for such violation.”

Actions that violate the bill, S.B. 2782, would include talking to adolescents about a website where they can find information on where to access gender-transition services or helping a minor travel outside the state to receive such services.

The bill will now make its way to Governor Bill Lee’s desk for final approval. While Lee hasn’t publicly shared his position on the bill, he previously signed the state’s ban on gender-transition treatment for children. 

One day earlier, the legislature approved a bill that would similarly criminalize adults who help minors obtain abortions without parental consent.

Tennessee would become only the second state in the U.S. to make it a criminal violation of the law for adults to help facilitate abortions for minors, after Idaho, according to Fox News. The state would become the first to apply similar penalties to adults who help minors receive gender-transition services.

Internal documents from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) recently revealed that its experts have privately acknowledged that young patients often lack proper understanding about the severity of the life-altering medical decisions they’re making and the possible consequences involved, including sterility, derailed sexual development, and general regret.

This despite the group’s publicly advocating in its Standards of Care 8 that those with diagnosed “gender incongruence” have access to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries, as long as patients can demonstrate “the emotional and cognitive maturity required to provide informed consent/assent for the treatment.”

The documents, obtained by Environmental Progress, show that WPATH president Marci Bowers acknowledged during a January 2022 board meeting that the effects of puberty blockers on fertility and the “onset of orgasmic response” are not fully known. Boys who experience early puberty blocking can have “problematic surgical outcomes” and extreme difficulty climaxing, she said.

Other WPATH members have said the current transgender-treatment protocol might be correlated with advanced disease, such as cancer. One doctor reported treating a 16-year-old patient who developed large liver tumors after being prescribed norethindrone acetate, which can serve as a puberty-blocker substitute, to suppress menstruation for several years, and testosterone for one year.

WPATH member Dianne Berg, a child psychologist and co-author of the child chapter of Standards of Care 8, acknowledged that children lack the ability to “understand the extent to which some of these medical interventions are impacting them.”

And WPATH member Dr. Daniel Metzger warned it can be difficult to obtain informed consent from minors “who haven’t even had biology in high school yet,” the documents show.

Many young patients don’t understand that medical interventions can cause irreversible physical changes. He explained that some patients don’t realize they can’t receive hormone therapy only to have a lower voice, without also growing facial hair.

“It’s hard to kind of pick and choose the effects that you want,” Metzger said. “That’s something that kids wouldn’t normally understand because they haven’t had biology yet, but I think a lot of adults as well are hoping to be able to get X without getting Y, and that’s not always possible.”