House to vote on Marjorie Taylor Greene's bill to criminalize gender-affirming care, MTG says

Republican U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, on her way out of Congress but still doing damage, announced Wednesday that she’s been promised a vote in the House on her bill to criminalize the provision of gender-affirming care to transgender youth.

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise said he would bring the bill to a vote in exchange for Greene’s support of the National Defense Authorization Act, the far-right congresswoman said.

Related: Marjorie Taylor Greene, the anti-LGBTQ+ Republican congresswoman, to resign in January

“I made a deal and changed my NO vote on the rule to a Yes in exchange for a floor vote next week on my bill that is one of President Trump’s key campaign promises and executive orders,” she wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “Leader Steve Scalise has promised me that my bill Protect Children’s Innocence Act, H.R. 3492, will be brought to the floor for a vote next Wednesday, Dec 17th. This would make it a class c felony to trans a child under 18. Every Republican campaigned to protect kids from the trans agenda.”

There is no such thing as the trans agenda.

Greene’s bill would criminalize medically necessary, often lifesaving care for transgender youth. It would make it a felony to provide puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones for the treatment of gender dysphoria; the bill calls this “chemical castration,” even though the effects of these treatments are reversible. It would also ban gender-affirming surgery, which the bill terms “bodily mutilation.” Genital surgery is almost never performed on minors, although some undergo top surgery.

Health care providers would be subject to a sentence of up to 10 years in federal prison and/or a significant fine for violations if the bill becomes law. Even helping a trans teenager cross state lines or access telehealth services for care could result in a decade-long prison sentence, and parents could be implicated if they administer medication prescribed for their children. The measure would not apply to cisgender youth seeking similar interventions, such as breast reduction, puberty suppression for precocious puberty, or other medically approved procedures. It additionally would make exemptions for surgeries on intersex infants, many of which are nonconsensual and medically unnecessary — a practice widely condemned by human rights groups.

The House Judiciary Committee approved the bill on a party-line vote in June, but it has not come to a vote in the full House.

Related: 21 times Marjorie Taylor Greene was the worst

The NDAA itself contains some anti-trans provisions, including a ban on sports participation for trans women enrolled at military academies, as well as anti-DEI language. However, House and Senate negotiators have removed “a ban on funding for transgender-related surgeries, a policy that would have affected not only service members and their families but potentially any company with a military contract, blocking their insurance plans from covering transgender surgeries,” Erin in the Morning notes.

The Human Rights Campaign swiftly condemned the plan to vote on Greene’s bill. “Every family should have the freedom and privacy to go to the doctor and get the care their child needs,” HRC President Kelley Robinson said in a press release. “But politicians like Marjorie Taylor Greene and her enablers, who are breathlessly obsessed with using their power to terrorize transgender people, believe they know better than parents and doctors. Now, anti-equality members of the House may consider a bill to put doctors in prison just for doing their jobs. That could mean a pediatrician facing jail time for providing the care they were trained to provide. It could mean a parent being handcuffed and tossed into a police car because they went to the pharmacy and administered their child’s medication as prescribed. Our leaders should be working out a solution to the impending crisis of soaring health care costs and ensuring every child has access to quality health care — not dreaming up new ways to use the power of government to tear people’s lives apart. We will not rest until this bill is defeated.”