Missouri Attorney General (AG) Eric Schmitt is among the 13 Republican state attorneys general who warned U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland last week against criminalizing critics of gender reassignment surgeries.
Schmitt, Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti, and others delivered a letter in response to Oct. 3 correspondence from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), American Medical Association (AMA), and the Children’s Hospital Association (CHA) urging Garland "to investigate and prosecute people who question the medical establishment’s current treatment of children struggling with gender dysphoria."
As previously reported by Fox News Digital, the top prosecutors said in their letter that comments by critics of child gender surgeries are protected by the First Amendment.
“Our support for the attorney general is because we want this to be taken much more seriously than it seems to be taken,” said Stanley Goldfarb, chairman of Do No Harm, a national anti-discrimination medical organization. “This idea that we should affirm every child who starts to make this decision is a form of insanity.”
In recent months, elected officials in California and Virginia have undertaken legislation that addresses the criminalization of parents who either support or don’t support the use of puberty blockers and gender reassignment surgery in their children.
“Parents should definitely be involved in it,” Goldfarb told the St. Louis Record. “No one would dispute the fact that a 13-year-old child really hasn't the maturity and the emotional development to make these kinds of decisions on their own.”
While Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco)’s Senate Bill (SB) 107 would protect and prevent the criminalization of parents in California, Virginia parents could face charges for not supporting their transgender child under a new bill that Democratic Virginia Delegate Elizabeth Guzman plans to sponsor, according to media reports.
“What's been quite clear is that once children start taking these puberty blockers that the vast majority of them go on and start taking hormones, their bodies change and the long-term consequences of this are just not known,” Goldfarb added. “Do No Harm’s view of this is we don't want anybody to be criminalized for this. What we do want is a really, really careful evaluation that this isn't a psychological problem that therapy can correct.”