PIERRE, S.D. — South Dakota lawmakers in the House Health and Services Committee on Tuesday advanced a bill along party lines that would ban certain health care for transgender kids in the state.
House Bill 1080, which supporters call the “Help not Harm” bill, would prohibit certain types of care for transgender minors in South Dakota. Republican Representative Bethany Soye, the prime sponsor of the bill, told lawmakers that medical providers have become “increasingly bold” about this type of treatment.
The bill would prohibit three things.
“The use of puberty blockers to stop healthy development, the prescription of cross-sex hormones, which often leave children sterilized, and the irreversible surgeries that leave a child’s body permanently damaged,” Soye told the committee.
The bill would not impact birth control, Soye added.
Opponents of the bill included the American Civil Liberties Union of South Dakota, a transgender teenager, legal and medical professionals and the South Dakota Medical Association.
“Often in these chambers, we hear about freedom, liberty, parental rights and limited government. HB 1080 is the antithesis of those concepts,” South Dakota State Medical Association lobbyist Justin Bell said. “And such would intrude on the patient-physician relationship, the parent and child relationship and would prevent physicians from providing evidence-based medical treatment to minor patients despite the wishes of the patient and the parents of that child.”
