California is on its way to becoming a sanctuary state for transgender children who want to circumvent laws banning medical procedures in their home states.
A bill creating a safe haven against parents, insurance companies, and other state courts passed a California State Assembly committee Tuesday despite a barrage of testimony from parents and former trans children who wanted the lawmakers to reconsider. It is almost certain to pass the full legislature due to California’s Democratic supermajority, becoming one of the first states to create such a safe haven.
The Golden State made history in 2018 when it became the first sanctuary state for illegal immigrants.
Substack blogger Emmaline was featured in a four-part Washington Examiner
investigation into the dangers of transgender medical procedures for teenagers and testified in the hearing by phone.
“These are not my elected officials. They are taking away my rights in another state to protect my child and keep her body safe until she fully matures,” she said in an interview. “This impacts my rights as a parent in New York should my child find her way to California through a friend, school trip, or family member. Now she has access to receiving gender-affirming care without my consent.”
‘WE ARE JUST GUINEA PIGS’: WOMEN DESCRIBE TRAUMA OF TRANSITIONING AS TEENS
Authored by San Francisco Sen. Scott Wiener, SB107 gives a mechanism for doctors, insurance companies, and contractors to disregard subpoenas from other states pertaining to child custody or other court actions if the child is receiving transgender medical care. It also seals the records from outside view.
“A law of another state that authorizes a state agency to remove a child from their parent or guardian based on the parent or guardian allowing their child to receive gender-affirming health care shall not be enforced or applied in a case pending in a court in this state,” the bill reads
. It also prohibited California attorneys from issuing subpoenas.
A handful of states
, led by Texas, have laws prohibiting doctors from providing transgender medical care to minors. Like similar proposed legislation providing a haven for abortions, critics fear that it opens the floodgates to circumvent laws in other states.
Chloe Cole, @puddingpandan, a 17-year-old detransitioner, spoke out today against Scott Wiener’s California bill SB107, which would allow parents from other states to bring their children to California for “puberty blockers” and surgeries. pic.twitter.com/GrqnBkxECL
— Women’s Voices (@WomenReadWomen) June 28, 2022
“At age 15, I asked to remove my breasts. I was unknowingly, physically, cutting off my true self from my body. Irreversibly and painfully,” Chloe Cole, 17, testified at the hearing in urging a no vote. “I really didn’t understand all the ramifications of any of the medical decisions I was making. I wasn’t capable of understanding, and it was downplayed consistently.”
Dozens of people spoke out at the hearing, with the majority saying they were former Democrats who opposed the bill.
However, Wiener said he wrote the legislation to protect families “who flee to California” seeking transgender healthcare.
“The history of the LGBTQ community is a history of criminalization: Society trying to erase us & then punishing us if we refuse to be erased, whether by death, incarceration, beatings, lobotomies/electric shock, etc.,” he tweeted. “CA won’t be a party to this new phase of LGBTQ criminalization.”
But Republicans see the bill as unconstitutional, trying to circumvent the laws of other states.
“This bill would violate the full faith and credit clause of the U.S. Constitution, which provides that the various states must recognize legislative acts, public records, and judicial decisions of the other states within the United States,” said Sen. Melissa Melendez (R-Murrieta). “The law will encourage other states to pick and choose which California subpoenas and custody orders they wish to enforce.”
She said transgender medical procedures create serious medical risks, including suicide, and should be “flatly rejected.”
The Washington Examiner profiled the case of a California teenager who was forcibly taken from a mother who disagreed with her child’s decision to transition from female to male. Yaeli Martinez was placed in foster care to continue with a secret plan hatched by county social workers and a local school to undergo medical procedures, Yaeli’s mother Abby Martinez said. Shortly after starting hormone treatments, the younger Martinez died by suicide after stepping in front of a train.
“They killed my daughter,” Abby Martinez said. “They had to pick pieces of her off of the track.”
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Meanwhile, medical experts say the health risks are vast and cut the life expectancy by 50%.
“I’ve been the lone voice in the wilderness crying out about this,” said Dr. Quentin Van Meter, the president of the American College of Pediatricians. “The system is the problem. It is a cult machine sucking these children in and putting them on a conveyor belt.”
