(LifeSiteNews) — Iowa is the latest state to prohibit surgical or chemical “transitioning” of gender-confused minors as well as forcing students to share restrooms with members of the opposite sex, thanks to new laws signed by Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds.
The Des Moines Register reports that on Wednesday, Reynolds signed Senate File 538, which prohibits Iowa doctors from prescribing puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or “transition” surgeries to anyone younger than 18, and Senate File 482, which forbids schools from allowing individuals to use a bathroom or changing facility that does not match their biological sex.
The second bill also requires parental consent for a student to use alternative facilities, in order to prevent schools from indulging a child’s gender confusion behind their parents’ backs.
“We need to just pause, we need to understand what these emerging therapies actually may potentially do to our kids,” Reynolds said. “My heart goes out to them. I’m a parent, I’m a grandmother, I know how difficult this is. This is an extremely uncomfortable position for me to be in. I don’t like it. But I have to do what I believe right now is in the best interest of the kids.”
Left-wing groups including the Iowa chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Iowa State Education Association condemned the new laws. Cathryn Oakley, state legislative director for the far-left LGBT activist group Human Rights Campaign, attacked the “transitioning” measure as “life-threatening.”
However, evidence indicates that the danger rests with promoting transgenderism, rather than curbing it.
Studies find that more than 80% of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide — and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
On top of those issues, experts outside the medical establishment further warn that surgically or chemically reinforcing gender confusion imposes irreversible harm on children such as infertility, impairment of adult sexual function, and reduced life expectancy, as well as the psychological toll of being “locked into” physical alterations regardless of whether they change their minds when they mature.
The issue is grimly illustrated in the story of Yaeli Martinez, a 19-year-old to whom “gender transitioning” was touted as a possible cure for her depression in high school, supported by a high school counselor who withheld what she was going through from her mother. The troubled girl killed herself after trying to live as a man for three years.
Many oft-ignored “detransitioners,” individuals who attempted to live under a different “gender identity” before embracing their sex, attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject.
As for the other law, conservatives warn that forcing children and teens to share intimate facilities such as bathrooms, showers, or changing areas with members of the opposite sex violates their privacy rights, subjects them to needless emotional stress, and gives potential male predators a viable pretext to enter female bathrooms or lockers by simply claiming transgender status.
The problem is currently on full display in Virginia, where a grand jury returned charges against fired ex-Loudoun County Public Schools superintendent Scott Ziegler for allegedly covering up the rape of a female student by a “transgender” classmate in a girls’ bathroom due to its damaging implications for the LGBT movement.
