27 January 2023 — 0632 mst
SB-99 is a wrong headed attempt
to have the legislature practice medicine
By James Conner
One of this legislative session’s most controversial bills — State Sen. John Fuller’s SB-99 — will be heard this morning by the state senate’s judiciary committee at 0800 (watch or listen). SB-99 makes illegal most treatments for gender dysphoria (definition) for Montanans under 18 years of ago. It’s official title is long and cumbersome.
An act providing for a youth health protection act; prohibiting certain medical and surgical treatments to treat minors with gender dysphoria; prohibiting public funds, programs, property, and employees from being used for these treatments; providing that a health care professional who violates this law commits professional misconduct; providing a private cause of action; prohibiting discharge of professional liability via insurance; and providing definitions.
SB-99 is the son of the 2021 session’s HB-113, a similar bill by Fuller that died 49–51 on the third reading in the state house.
The heart of SB-99 is this excerpt from the amended version that Fuller will present to the judiciary committee.
“Sex” means the organization of body plans and 19 gametes for reproduction in human beings and other organisms. In human beings, there are exactly two sexes, male and female, with two corresponding gametes. The sexes are determined by the biological indication of male or female, including sex chromosomes, naturally occurring sex chromosomes, gonads, and nonambiguous internal and external genitalia present at birth, without regard to an individual’s psychological, behavioral, social, cultural, chosen, or subjective experience of gender. [Page 2, lines 15–23; emphasis added.]
Definition of gamete from the National Human Genome Research Institute:
A gamete is a reproductive cell of an animal or plant. In animals, female gametes are called ova or egg cells, and male gametes are called sperm. Ova and sperm are haploid cells, with each cell carrying only one copy of each chromosome. During fertilization, a sperm and ovum unite to form a new diploid organism.
SB-99 it is one of a glut of similar bills — wedge bills that seek to inflame and divide voters — that the New York Times reports are being considered in state legislatures around the country.
Over the past three years, Republican state lawmakers have put forward a barrage of bills to regulate the lives of transgender youths, restricting the sports teams they can play on, bathrooms they can use and medical care they can receive.
But even by those standards, the start of the 2023 legislative season stands out for the aggressiveness with which lawmakers are pushing into new territory.
The bills they have proposed — more than 150 in at least 25 states — include bans on transition care into young adulthood; restrictions on drag shows using definitions that could broadly encompass performances by transgender people; measures that would prevent teachers in many cases from using names or pronouns matching students’ gender identities; and requirements that schools out transgender students to their parents.
The flood of legislation is part of a long-term campaign by national groups that see transgender rights as an issue on which they can harness voter anger — as with the campaigns against remote learning and critical race theory that reshaped many school boards and lifted Republicans in Virginia’s elections in 2021 — though the midterm elections provided little evidence of it.
“This is a political winner,” said Terry Schilling, the president of the conservative American Principles Project, arguing that more voters would have been swayed had many Republicans not “shied away” from the subject.
Like all effective wedge bills SB-99 touches on a legitimate concern: the possibility that overly aggressive treatment of gender dysphoria could involve irreversible medical procedures that could turn out to not have been warranted. I suspect that much of the concern results from recent surveys, such as PEW’s 7 June 2022 About 5% of young adults in the U.S. say their gender is different from their sex assigned at birth.
The incidence of dysphoria in older cohorts is considerably lower, which can be interpreted to mean that given time children will grow out of doubts that their sexual identity differs from their sex identified at birth. If this interpretation is correct, the concern that SB-99 purports to address is legitimate and not a hysterical reaction to various reports exaggerating the incidence of gender dysphoria.
But granting that the concern is legitimate does not mean that legislation is the best means of addressing the issue of excessively aggressive treatment. I don’t think it is, which is why I urged the judiciary committee to table the bill. I trust medical professionals to act responsibly. I do not trust legislators to practice medicine responsibly. No one should.
There are four possible outcomes for SB-99:
- It becomes law, hogtieing physicians and denying medical treatment to fragile young people.
- It dies, tabled in committee or voted down in the senate or house.
- It's converted to a bill authorizing an interim study on whether legislation on the issue is needed. That would kick the can down the road, but that's better than approving SB-99.
- It's converted to a non-binding resolution urging the medical community to be especially careful in treating young gender dysphoria
The bill is not just an attempt to regulate treatment for gender dysphoria. It’s also a proxy in the culture war over whether people really can change genders. Pew found that public opinion on that is divided sharply along religious lines.
As reported by Nicole Girten at The Daily Montanan, SB-99 is not the only hot button bill on sex that the legislature will consider this session. None, in my opinion, is a solution to a real problem. They’re all cheap shots in the GOP’s never ending cultural war against urban liberals and the mythical wokers who disrespect god fearing rural residents. It’s not helpful. And it wastes time that should be spent on issues such as affordable housing.
You can send the judiciary committee comments through the legislature’s online form.