The Georgia Senate on Thursday voted to ban medical professionals from prescribing puberty blockers to transgender minors.
The Senate voted 32-19 to approve House Bill 1170, with Democrats opposing it.
Just last year, the General Assembly approved legislation that banned minors from receiving any potential permanent changes from hormone treatment therapy and surgery, but it allowed those under 18 to receive puberty-blocking medication — which Republican members said at the time was not a permanent treatment.
A year later, Senate Health and Human Services Committee Chairman Ben Watson, a Savannah Republican and geriatric doctor who amended HB 1170, said minors who take puberty blockers frequently go on to have some type of surgery, but many of those who do not opt not to physically transition.
“Gender dysphoria is something that certainly needs treatment. It should start out with voluminous mental health care, but it should not end in children with irreversible changes,” he said.
Unlike last year, the new bill does not include a “grandfather clause” to allow minors already receiving puberty blockers to continue taking them. It also removes the exemption in last year’s law that allowed minors on hormone replacement therapies to continue receiving the medication as long as they began treatment before the law took effect July 1.
Senators rejected an attempt to put a similar clause in this year’s bill.
That means if the bill passes the House and is signed into law, minors would no longer be allowed to receive puberty blockers or hormone replacement therapy, regardless of whether they already were on the medications.
During debate on the bill, state Sen. Kim Jackson, a Pine Lake Democrat who is the Senate’s only openly LGBTQ member, said she remembered a time in the ‘80s and ‘90s when lawmakers considered endorsing the practice of conversion therapy for gay children.
Those children, she said, grew up to be well-adjusted, productive and happy members of society and that society has moved away from pushing conversion therapy.
“If we allow these trans children to develop into full, whole human beings as they are, we might discover this very conversation that we’re having today was in fact wrong and outdated and that children deserve to be able to express themselves as they fully are,” Jackson said.
It’s unclear whether the bill will pass the House.
Watson, who has been in the Senate since 2015, is facing far right-wing Savannah activist Beth “Big Fire” Majeroni in a GOP primary in May.
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