Tennessee State Representative and House Republican Caucus Chairman Jeremy Faison (R-Cosby) introduced a bill on Wednesday that would preserve “critical rights for victims of radical cosmetic gender reassignment surgeries.”
Faison said his bill, House Bill 2816, would protect “four basic rights of Tennesseans, including the right to insurance coverage, mental health care access, legal restoration and the right to transparency.”
The bill would require gender clinics accepting funds from the state to perform gender transition procedures to also perform detransition procedures, as well as require insurance entities providing coverage of gender transition procedures to also cover detransition procedures.
The legislation would also require certain gender clinics and insurance entities to report information regarding detransition procedures to the Tennessee Department of Health, including the number of patients treated, their ages, diagnoses, and drugs administered.
Faison said the “significant lack of scientific evidence and the irreversible consequences that come with [gender transition] treatments are deeply concerning.”
“This legislation provides protections and rights for gender-confused individuals who were encouraged to undergo permanently disfiguring surgeries and interventions,” Faison said in a statement. “Tragically, many suffer from extraordinary physical pain, mental health challenges, and deep regret after sex reassignment.”
Faison’s bill would also prohibit any Tennessee county or municipality from passing a local ordinance banning access to mental health care, which the state lawmaker said will ultimately “prevent local governments from circumventing parental consent to mental health care for a child who is experiencing feelings of inconsistency about their gender.”
The bill would also “aim to ease the burden of detransitioning” by expediting processes through the state that help return a person’s biological sex, name, and other personal information on legal documents.
“A person in distress who is suffering from gender dysphoria should be treated with respect, love and understanding as well as with the appropriate mental health care,” Faison said. “This legislation recognizes the trauma endured by these individuals and helps to provide a way back from the harm inflicted.”
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Additionally, we need a law that requires factual information to be shared with, and signed by, any person (or their guardian) who is a prospective patient for transgender surgery which details and reinforces the irreversible damage done by have such surgery. Also, there should be no statute of limitations for suing an entity who has performed, an/or approved, such surgery on a child who later reaches the age of consent and realizes/believes they were coerced and/or manipulated into having the surgery before their mental development was allowed to fully mature.
Anyone responsible for pushing this barbarism on children and young adults should be fully aware that they may suffer severe financial consequences for pushing this ideology on impressionable individuals.