Retaliating against President Donald Trump’s executive order designed to protect minors from receiving harmful, life-altering gender transition “chemical and surgical mutilation,” California’s attorney general has ordered hospitals that comply to deny hormonal treatments to straight people who need them.
On Wednesday, California Attorney General Rob Bonta issued guidance to the state’s hospitals warning them that they could face discrimination charges if they provide services to people seeking to better align themselves with their biological genders.
“California supports the rights of transgender youth to live their lives as their authentic selves,” Bonta said in an ironic statement implying that biological sex is, somehow, not “authentic.”
“We will not let the president turn back the clock or deter us from upholding California values,” Bonta said in defiance of Trump’s executive order denying federal funding to hospitals that provide transgender surgeries and treatments to minors:
“I understand that the President’s executive order on gender affirming care has created some confusion. Let me be clear: California law has not changed, and hospitals and clinics have a legal obligation to provide equal access to healthcare services.”
Bonta was one of 23 state attorneys general who sued the administration over its federal funding freeze. Bonta contends that, since a judge granted a temporary restraining order on the Trump Administration’s government-wide federal funding freeze, the executive order protecting minors is also in abeyance.
The California attorney general warned hospitals that, since state law prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, hospitals that comply with the Trump Administration’s executive order must also deny similar medical services to people who want to support their biological sex (“cisgenders”):
“Furthermore, California law, including the Unruh Civil Rights Act, Civil Code section 51 and Government Code section 11135, prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.
“Electing to refuse services to a class of individuals based on their protected status, such as withholding services from transgender individuals based on their gender identity or their diagnosis of gender dysphoria, while offering such services to cisgender individuals, is discrimination.”
“California families seeking gender-affirming care, and the doctors and staff who provide it, are protected under state laws,” Bonta decreed.
But, as Pres. Trump explains in his executive order, impressionable minors are being misled, then subjected to harmful treatments that cannot be undone when they are old enough to make mature decisions:
“Across the country today, medical professionals are maiming and sterilizing a growing number of impressionable children under the radical and false claim that adults can change a child’s sex through a series of irreversible medical interventions. This dangerous trend will be a stain on our Nation’s history, and it must end.
“Countless children soon regret that they have been mutilated and begin to grasp the horrifying tragedy that they will never be able to conceive children of their own or nurture their children through breastfeeding.”