Republican Sen. Roger Marshall, a Kansas obstetrician who delivered thousands of babies, will introduce legislation next week to forbid all transgender medical procedures for minors. The Safeguarding the Overall Protection of Minors (STOP) Act would prohibit “any gender transition procedure on a minor under age 18 — including but not limited to puberty blockers, high-dose cross-sex hormones, mastectomies, hysterectomies, genital surgeries, and facial procedures,” with civil penalties of up to $100,000 per violation for doctors and clinics.
The bill also “creates a private right of action for victims of gender transition procedures — or their parent, guardian, or caretaker if the victim was still a minor — to sue in federal court for damages,” and proposes to establish the “Victims of Gender Transition Procedures Compensation Fund” in the U.S. Treasury, funded by civil penalties.
“As an OB-GYN with over two decades of clinical experience, I know firsthand what these irreversible procedures do to children,” Marshall told The Federalist. “These are not medical treatments — they are child abuse. The STOP Act sends a clear message: if you harm a child by performing these procedures, there will be serious consequences. Our children deserve nothing less.”
About time, activists said, in a response that crosses partisan lines.
Kara Dansky is a radical feminist and Democrat, and the former president of Women’s Declaration International USA. She writes the TERF Report on Substack (a TERF is a trans-exclusionary radical feminist) and is the author of The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls. Pointing to Article 9 of the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights, she told The Federalist, “Children have an international human right to be protected from such harmful interventions.”
Erin Friday is the president of the parents’ advocacy group of Our Duty USA, and a California resident. As her state legislature relentlessly promotes transgender interventions for minors, Friday sees federal intervention as an important corrective to blue state madness.
“This bill will provide much-needed protection for children in left-leaning states from the sex-rejecting industry being fiendishly promoted and safeguarded by Democrat-controlled state legislatures,” Friday said in a statement to The Federalist. “The might of the federal government is needed to stop the Democratic Party’s ceaseless campaign to poison, sterilize, and remove sex organs of children in order to curry favor with fringe but well-funded transgender advocates. The states without effective and full bans are in desperate need of this bill.”
And Dr. Eithan Haim, a conservative Texas surgeon who worked with the journalist Christopher Rufo to warn the public that Texas Children’s Hospital was lying when it claimed to have stopped trans procedures on children, suggested ways for federal legislation to go farther.
“Passage of the STOP Act would be a massive step in the right direction. It would not only mitigate the incalculable harm being done to vulnerable children but also demonstrate that Republican Senators have not become fully paralyzed by shameless corruption,” Haim told The Federalist. “So this legislation is a good start. One provision that should be added is to grant state Attorneys General offices civil investigative authority into public and private insurance data to uncover fraudulent billing practices in gender clinics. Because without the ability to detect these practices, nothing can be done to stop it.”
Marshall’s office expects the bill to drop by the middle of next week.
