SALT LAKE CITY — The first of three bills aimed at transgender youth in Utah surprisingly failed to advance out of a House committee on Tuesday. However, the committee later voted to advance another controversial bill.
Dozens of Utahns turned out to the House Health and Human Services Committee meeting Tuesday to defend and oppose Rep. Rex P. Shipp's bill that would ban doctors from prescribing testosterone or estrogen to transgender minors.
“Kids who have undergone these procedures have been steered into, or rushed into, treatments at an age where they do not have the maturity, experience, judgment or knowledge necessary to make permanent life-altering decisions for themselves," he said.
After a public hearing that lasted for more than an hour, Shipp’s Prohibiting Sex Transitioning Procedures on Minors bill failed to move forward in a 9 to 5 vote.
“I am not delusional," said Oliver Day, a transgender 16-year-old. "I am not confused. I am transgender, whether you agree with me or not. I do not need your protection.”
WATCH: Hundreds protest trans youth bills on steps of Utah State Capitol
Next on the agenda was Sen. Mike Kennedy’s Sex Characteristic Procedures bill, which passed in the Senate’s Health and Human Services Committee meeting last week.
“These novel and irreversible procedures lack sufficient long-term research, but still our country is witnessing a radical and dangerous push for children to enter this version of healthcare," said Kennedy.
Despite arguments against the bill from the public and from committee members, the bill banning gender-affirming surgeries for minors passed in an 11 to 3 vote.
“It doesn't make sense that we would say to one juvenile girl that they can have breast augmentation because they want to look more like what society advertises a woman should look like," said Rep. Marsha Judkins. "That’s OK and safe, but to a juvenile transgender girl who wants the same surgery, a breast augmentation, that they can’t.”
There was a third bill on Tuesday's agenda, also relating to transgender minors: Senate Bill 100, which would require schools to give parents information on their children; specifically, if a child starts identifying by different pronouns in school. However, the House’s discussion of this bill was postponed for another day because public comment on the first two took the meeting past its scheduled end time.
