Democrats in the New York state legislature have put forth legislation that appears to be designed to allow minors to undergo transgender procedures without parental consent.
New York Assembly Bill A06761, which Democratic State Assemblywoman Karines Reyes introduced in January, would allow homeless youth to have the ability to “give effective consent to certain medical, dental, health, and hospital services.”
Parental rights advocates warn that the language of the bill is intentionally “vague” and argue that the law could potentially grant children the ability to provide consent for sex-change medical procedures without their parents ever being informed.
Reyes, however, insists that the purpose behind the bill is to enable children to access routine medical services like the flu shot. She told Bronx News 12 that the legislation is intended to address a “very small fraction of young people who are currently falling through the cracks.”
The devil, of course, is in the details. The following language in the bill clearly reveals the legislation’s true purpose.
Any person, including a minor, who comprehends the need for, the nature of, and the reasonably foreseeable risks and benefits involved in any contemplated medical, dental, health, and/or hospital services, and any alternatives thereto, may give effective consent to such services for themself, and the consent of no other person shall be necessary. The commissioner is authorized to promulgate rules and regulations necessary to effectuate the provisions of this subdivision.
This broad language has sparked discussions about the potential implications and scope of medical decisions that minors could autonomously make if the bill were to become law.
Sarah Parshall Perry, a senior legal fellow at the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Caller that this language is clearly meant to apply to all minors who wish to exclude their parents from the decision-making process, particularly when acquiring transgender procedures.
“I find this very interesting language here,” Parshall Perry said. “When we … paint children as incapable of making contracts, voting, getting a tattoo, or registering for the draft, while saying they have sufficient maturity and intelligence to be able to make consequential decisions about long-term healthcare; decisions that will affect their bodies, potentially for the rest of their lives. That is distinctly an effort to evade parental notification and parental involvement [in cases] where parents aren’t supportive of the junk science.”
Related: Is the Tide Turning Against Transing Children?
Transgender procedures have serious side effects and are largely irreversible. Hormones and puberty blockers cause infertility and the danger of loss of bone mass. Physical surgeries have extremely high complication rates, often resulting in multiple follow-up surgeries that create lifelong patients.
It gets worse. According to Michael Kane, a former special education teacher who was fired for refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine, the bill could turn teachers and guidance counselors into tools of the state. He told the Daily Caller that when he was a teacher, he was told he must affirm a child’s gender identity or risk being accused of “conversion therapy,” which New York made illegal in 2019.
“As a teacher when a crisis came up from one of my kids, I went to a guidance counselor,” Kane said. “I’ve talked to guidance counselors who have directly said to me, ‘If a child tells me that they are a different sex and they want a different name, I automatically call them that and automatically call them by those pronouns.’ There’s no other questions asked besides that.”
“This is criminal, and we need to fight this with every fiber of our beings. Our kids are on the line and I’m sorry that this is seen as a conservative issue. I think any normal parent on either side of the aisle that you speak to about it would agree without ever considering this to be political,” Natalya Murakhver, the founder of Restore Childhood, told the Daily Caller.