On Tuesday, Republican Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt signed a bill to prevent gender transition services for children at Oklahoma Children’s Hospital.
According to a press release from the governor’s office, under the requirement that Oklahoma Children’s Hospital stops providing gender reassignment services to children, the bill provides “nearly $40 million in ARPA funding to increase and expand capacity of behavioral health care for children, as well as $20 million for cancer patients who have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic, $44 million for electronic health record systems, and over $5 million for mobile dental units.”
“By signing this bill today we are taking the first step to protect children from permanent gender transition surgeries and therapies. It is wildly inappropriate for taxpayer dollars to be used for condoning, promoting, or performing these types of controversial procedures on healthy children,” Governor Stitt said in a statement.
“I am calling for the Legislature to ban all irreversible gender transition surgeries and hormone therapies on minors when they convene next session in February 2023,” he added. “We cannot turn a blind eye to what’s happening all across our nation, and as governor I will not allow life-altering transition surgeries on minor children in the state of Oklahoma.”
Other Republican state officials echoed Stitt’s comments of the bill not going far enough.
“Let’s be abundantly clear. This doesn’t stop minors in the state of Oklahoma from having sex change surgeries,” said state Sen. Nathan Dah. “It only stops it from happening at OU.”
