The DeSantis administration is requesting information from state universities regarding “services” reportedly offered to those suffering from gender dysmorphia, as the administration said it is its duty to ensure that Florida’s laws are being “faithfully executed.”
The Executive Office of the Governor memo, from Chris Spencer, Office of Policy and Budget, addressed to the chairs of all state university boards of trustees, first validates the request, plainly noting that state universities are part of the executive branch of the state government, as are the university board of trustees.
The governor’s office wrote that it has been made aware of “several” state universities providing “services” to those suffering from general dysmorphia, and it therefore needs more information on what, exactly, those services entail.
For instance, the administration is requesting the number of interactions between health care providers and patients for the purpose of “sex-reassignment treatment or where such treatment was sought,” with a few sub-questions under that category, including the facilities that these patients were referred to for sex-reassignment “treatment.”
The office is also asking for the number of individuals who were prescribed puberty blockers, hormones, and hormone antagonists with an age breakdown for each category. Further, the administration is asking for the number of individuals who underwent actual medical procedures, which include mastectomies, breast augmentations, orchiectomies, penectomies, vaginoplasties, hysterectomies, metoidioplasties, vaginectomies, salpingo-oophorectomies, phalloplasties, and scrotoplasties with a breakdown by age.
The administration is also inquiring whether these individuals received “behavioral health treatments” prior to their first procedure and the time frames associated with such.
The administration is seeking this information from January 1, 2018, to present day.
Last summer, Florida released a formal Florida Medicaid report — requested by the Secretary of the Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) — questioning the science behind “gender-affirming” care, deeming it “experimental and investigational” in nature and not “safe and effective” as the radical left routinely touts. It found that there are not enough studies to safely consider these procedures, including puberty blockers and surgical procedures, as safe nor actual “treatments” at all due to their permanent and devastating effects.
The report reads in part:
To the contrary, the evidence shows that the above treatments pose irreversible consequences, exacerbate or fail to alleviate existing mental conditions, and cause infertility or sterility. Given the current state of the evidence, the above treatments do not conform to GAPMS and are experimental and investigational.
Ultimately, Florida moved to prohibit Medicaid from covering transgender procedures last August. In October, the Florida Board of Medicine voted to ban the mutilation of children under the guise of “gender-affirming” care.
“When they say gender-affirming care, they mean giving puberty blockers to teenage girls and teenage boys,” DeSantis said in October 2022. “They mean doing double mastectomies on young girls. They mean chemically-castrating young boys.”
“That is wrong,” he continued. “We are not going to allow that to happen in the state of Florida. A lot of kids go through a lot of different things. A lot of the dysphoria resolves itself by the time they become adults and we have a number of people that have spoken out in favor of what we’re doing, to say you should not do this with minors. They went through it when they were minors. Now they’re adults and they regret it. Other countries in Europe that went down this road have now backtracked.”
The release of the letter comes on the heels of the Florida College System presidents’ letter, reaffirming that it will not support Critical Race Theory (CRT) or other divisive “diversity”-related initiatives on campuses.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.