Alabama Passes Bill Baning Child Sex Change Treatments, Jailing Doctors Who Transition Kids

The Alabama legislature passed a bill Thursday criminalizing sex change treatments for children including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and sex-change surgeries.

The bill, if signed by Gov. Kay Ivey, would treat the castration of children and other sex-change treatments as Class C felonies which, according to Politico, carry a penalty of up to ten years in prison for medical practitioners.

The legislation would ban medical treatments done for the purpose of changing a child’s appearance or affirming their gender identity, including drugs that halt healthy puberty, cross-sex hormones, surgical sterilizations such as castration, vasectomies and hysterectomies, cosmetic genital reconstruction surgeries and the removal of healthy body parts.

The bill makes exceptions for male circumcision and for treatment of medically verifiable sex disorders such as chromosome irregularities. The bill also makes it illegal for teachers and other school employees to encourage children to withhold information from their parents about their gender confusion.

An attorney from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Alabama called the Alabama legislation “shameful,” and a senior attorney for an LGBT activist organization Lambda Legal called it “cruel, dangerous, and unconstitutional,” according to an ACLU press release.

Alabama is the first state attempting to explicitly ban sex-change procedures for minors. Texas plans to prosecute parents who medically “transition” their children to the opposite sex under existing child abuse laws.

It is unclear whether Ivey will sign the bill, and her office did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.