In the waning days of her stormy tenure in Congress, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is getting a vote on a measure that has been a thwarted legislative priority of hers for several years.
The House today will vote on a bill that would end gender transition care for minors nationwide, legislation Greene (R-Georgia) first introduced in August 2022. It will be the first time a national trans youth care ban has reached the House floor.
Greene said online that House leadership had promised her the vote after she made a deal and agreed to advance the National Defense Authorization Act. Greene had previously voted against the defense bill. But with Greene’s switch, the act narrowly cleared its final procedural hurdle by a vote of 215-211.
Greene’s bill, dubbed the Protect Children’s Innocence Act, would charge health care providers with up to 10 years in prison if they treat young people under the age of 18 with puberty blockers, hormones and surgeries. The legislation would also punish anyone — including parents — who consents to or transports a minor to the care.
Greene called the proposal “one of President Trump’s key campaign promises and executive orders.”
“Every Republican campaigned to protect kids from the trans agenda,” she wrote on X.
More than half of U.S. states already ban such medical treatment and some, such as Mississippi, also forbid residents from traveling outside of the state to attain it. The Supreme Court ruled in Junethat a Tennessee ban did not violate the Constitution, and President Donald Trump signed an executive order in January that directed federal agencies to withhold money from institutions that offer the treatment. Providers in blue states have continued to treat trans adolescents.
“The consequences could be very grave,” said Rep. Mark Takano (D-California), the chair of the Congressional Equality Caucus. “Politicians are not medical doctors. They’re not researchers. Most Americans do not like the idea of politicians inserting themselves into the consultation room where a doctor is meeting with parents and their kids. Rep. Greene should not be making this decision for doctors or parents, let alone writing legislation that would put parents in jail for 10 years.”
Experts say Greene’s bill likely will not pass the Senate and become federal law. But it could have lingering repercussions as it pushes Democrats to go on the record about an issue many have avoided discussing as public support for trans rights has waned. More than half of Americans now favor laws that ban doctors from offering gender transition care to minors — an increase of more than 20 percent since 2022, according to a Pew study released this year.
Advocates for trans youth say the bill will “terrorize” and “push out of public life” young people whose gender identity and sex at birth are incongruent. State laws targeting transgender people made trans and nonbinary youths between 25 percent and 27 percent more likely to attempt suicide at least once in the years after a measure becomes law, a recent study published in the Nature Human Behaviour journal concluded. In a separate analysis of FBI data, The Washington Post last year found that school hate crimes rose sharply in states that passed laws restricting LGBTQ rights.
Still, Trump has made it a focus of his administration. He has signed multiple executive orders targeting trans rights, and earlier this year, his Justice Department demanded dozens of hospitals turn over a wide range of sensitive information related to medical care for young transgender patients, including billing documents, communication with drug manufacturers, and data such as patient dates of birth, Social Security numbers and addresses.
The failure of Greene’s bill to move to a vote might be a reflection of Republican legislative priorities. While more than two-thirds of Republican voters support bans, they have repeatedly said in polls that the issue is not as important to them as the economy, gun rights or inflation.
Greene has increasingly clashed with Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), and she said last month she will resign from Congress in early January. In a video announcing her departure, she slammed her colleagues, particularly House Republican leaders, over their handling of the shutdown and other issues she said have rendered Congress ineffective.
Hundreds of Republicans across the country ran on promises to end gender care for adolescents, she noted. They spent more than $215 million on network TV ads that decried what they described as “transgender ideology.” With Republicans in the majority, Greene reintroduced her bill in May. Still, the House did not vote on it.
Researchers have found that young LGBTQ people who hear about similar proposals are more likely to become depressed and have physical health problems.
“Hearing a representative speak about them, their identity, their lives, in a way that is so contrary to how they want to be perceived and move through the world, is profoundly impacting for LGBTQ young people,” said Tessa Juste, an LGBTQ movement-building and policy researcher at the Movement Advancement Project. “Instead of being able to grow up in a country that lets them learn and play and be kids, these youth are out here fighting for their right to exist in peace.”
Lawmakers will also consider another, more narrow bill from Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) Wednesday that would ban Medicaid from covering gender care for youth. Greene co-sponsored it.
Doctors helped a small number of young people transition for nearly two decades with little pushback. But as the number of young people who take puberty blockers or hormones grew from roughly 2,500 patients nationwide in 2017 to 5,600 in 2021, according to a Reuters’ analysis of insurance claims, conservative activists and politicians moved to outlaw the care.
Greene has been an especially outspoken critic of gender care, which she and others describe as “genital mutilation” and “chemical castration.”
“God doesn’t make mistakes, every child is perfect, and minors need protection to safely grow up before they decide to make permanent radical changes to their bodies,” Greene wrote on X last week. (Greene’s office did not return requests for comment.)
Though studies have found that the regret rates for those interventions are rare, conservative lawmakers have been swayed by the testimonies of a handful of young people who say they regret transitioning before their brains were fully developed. Some had double mastectomiesas teenagers. Others say they experience a range of irreversible side effectsafter taking testosterone or estrogen.
Doctors who treat transgender adolescents have long described the care as “lifesaving.” Trans young people have high rates of depression and suicidal thoughts, but with medical interventions such as puberty blockers and hormones, many go on to live happy, well-adjusted lives, researchers have found. Nearly every major medical association endorses the care.
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