Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said that he’d be willing to ban sex change operations in a podcast interview on May 2, following a Florida health department statement that gender reassigning treatments are not recommended for children and adolescents.
“80 percent of the cases resolve themselves as they grow up, and so you’re doing things that are permanently altering them, and then they’re not gonna be able to reverse that, and so I don’t think it’s appropriate for kids at all.”
Under Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo, the DOH stated that social gender transition and gender reassignment surgery should not be treatment options for children; puberty blockers and hormone therapy must not be prescribed to anyone under 18; and kids suffering from gender dysphoria must be provided with social support and seek counseling.
Based on the currently available evidence, “encouraging mastectomy, ovariectomy, uterine extirpation, penile disablement, tracheal shave, the prescription of hormones which are out of line with the genetic make-up of the child, or puberty blockers, are all clinical practices which run an unacceptably high risk of doing harm,” according to DOH press release.
Claiming improvement in “overall quality of life for transgender and gender diverse youth,” the HHS currently recommends hormone therapy from early adolescence and gender-affirming surgeries on an individual case-by-case basis.
However, the DOH maintains that “systematic reviews on hormonal treatment for young people show a trend of low-quality evidence, small sample sizes, and medium to high risk of bias.”
Given the transitory nature of the issue, Schwartz recommends psychotherapy as the best treatment option instead of the non-reversible surgical procedures.