The Florida Board of Medicine and the Florida Board of Osteopathic Medicine held a joint meeting last week to revise language and remove an exception that allowed children in clinical trials and studies at state universities to participate in chemical and genital mutilation.
Last October, the Florida Board of Medicine Legislative Committee approved a rule that would prohibit minors from receiving puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and mutilating surgery to remove healthy male or female organs. On November 4, the Boards passed and updated their “Standards of Practice for the Treatment of Gender Dysphoria in Minors,” the medical standards practice in Florida that prohibits medical professionals from beginning procedures for gender dysphoria in children under 18 years of age.
However, the Board of Osteopathic Medicine left an exception to its rule that would have allowed minors currently taking puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to continue if they were part of an Institutional Review Board approved clinical trial at a university affiliated center.
Between the two meetings in October and November, Governor Ron DeSantis appointed three new members to the seven-member Board of Osteopathic Medicine.
At a January 31 news conference, Governor DeSantis promised to ban “gender transitions” for children in Florida. He stated, “If you’re performing those procedures on these minors, you’re gonna lose your medical license here in Florida.”
On Friday, the Board of Osteopathic Medicine unanimously eliminated the exception to align with the Board of Medicine at the request of the Florida Department of Health.
In April 2022, Florida State Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo, released guidance warning against these harmful drugs and surgeries for minors.
The Florida Department of Health (DOH) Guidance stated: “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.
The guidance document also noted “a lack of conclusive evidence” for “gender transitioning” and “the potential for long-term, irreversible effects,” as well as analysis of the benefits of hormonal interventions “show a trend of low-quality evidence, small sample sizes, and medium to high risk of bias.” In addition, “80 percent of minors of those seeking clinical care will lose their desire to identify with the nonbirth sex.”
The Florida DOH Guidance also includes:
- “Social gender transition should not be a treatment option for children or adolescents.
- Anyone under 18 should not be prescribed puberty blockers or hormone therapy.
- Gender reassignment surgery should not be a treatment option for children or adolescents.
- Children and adolescents should be provided social support by peers and family and seek counseling from a licensed provider.”
The guidance refers to a study, “Clinical and Ethical Considerations in the Treatment of Gender Dysphoric Children and Adolescents: When Doing Less Is Helping More,” which determines that “through an analysis of recently published treatment protocols, research findings and clinical experience, and guided by the principle of ‘first, do no harm,’ the author argues that the use of pharmacological and surgical interventions in the treatment of gender dysphoric youth, especially in light of what is known about the transience of cross-gender identification in children, is mistaken both clinically and ethically.”
Dr. Ladapo said in a previous interview, “This is a parallel to the COVID vaccines in this country. If you only listen to the media in this country, you would think it is normal for people to recommend these vaccines for babies, toddlers, for children, for young adults. If you only listen to the media in this country, you’d think it’s normal for you to provide puberty blockers to children, to provide ‘sex reassignment’ surgeries to children who have a diagnosis of transgender. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, most of Europe are not pushing COVID-19 vaccines on children. They’re not even recommending them. Not pushing them on young adults. In the transgender area, backing off from providing this as routine care because they have been doing it longer than we have. There’s literally reports from governmental health organizations in Europe such as Sweden…where they basically say they can no longer recommend this as part of routine care because it’s not clear that the benefits outweigh the risks,” said Ladapo.
Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “Florida is once again leading the way to protect our precious children from these harmful social experiments pushed by LGBT activists and padding the pockets of medical professionals. This is child abuse and more states need to stand up and protect these children.”
