Bill Description: House Bill 675 would protect children from unnecessary, life-altering medical procedures by prohibiting medical providers from performing sex reassignment surgery on minors or prescribing puberty blockers to them.
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Does it violate the spirit or the letter of either the U.S. Constitution or the Idaho Constitution? Examples include restrictions on speech, public assembly, the press, privacy, private property, or firearms. Conversely, does it restore or uphold the protections guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution or the Idaho Constitution?
The most fundamental duty of government is to protect the life and liberty of the individual. House Bill 675 serves to advance this goal by amending Section 18-1506B, Idaho Code, to protect minor children from predatory or irreversible medical practices designed to alter their natural physical development.
In much the same way that Idaho code protects children from adults who would rape or molest them, this law would protect children from adults who would sterilize or otherwise surgically mutilate them.
House Bill 675 acknowledges that "medical intervention that results in the impairment and mutilation of the reproductive organs and parts of a child is never necessary to the health of the child on whom it is performed if it is for the sole purpose of attempting to change or affirm the child's perception of the child's sex if that perception is inconsistent with the child's biological sex."
Specifically, House Bill 675 prohibits medical providers from engaging in certain practices and procedures on a child that are intended to "change or affirm the child's perception of the child's sex if that perception is inconsistent with the child's biological sex."
These prohibitions include performing surgeries (popularly known as sex reassignment surgeries) on minors that "sterilize or mutilate" them, prescribing them drugs commonly known as puberty blockers, or prescribing large doses of testosterone to a girl or estrogen to a boy.
The protections established by this bill only apply to children. Upon reaching the age of 18, which is also the age of consent in Idaho, individuals will still be free to seek out providers of sterilization or surgical alteration if that is their choice.
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House Bill 675 creates a necessary and logical exception to the prohibitions detailed above by exempting minors who have "external biological sex characteristics that are ambiguous and irresolvable" and those who do not have "the normal sex chromosome structure for a male or female."
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