Florida Responds After Biden Deemed Protecting Children from Transgender Procedures ‘Sinful’

Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration set the record straight this week after President Biden deemed efforts to protect children from transgender procedures as “sinful,” making it clear that “pushing harmful surgeries and treatment with long-term effects on minors with no accountability or transparency” is the true transgression.

“What’s going on in Florida is, as my mother would say, close to sinful. It’s just terrible what they’re doing,” Biden said during a recent interview on The Daily Show.

“It’s not like a kid wakes up one morning and says, ‘You know, I decided I wanted to become a man or want to become a woman or I want to change.’ I mean, what are they thinking about here? They’re human beings. They love, they have feelings, they have inclinations,” Biden continued, calling it “cruel” to refuse to affirm a confused child’s beliefs or feelings about his or her gender.

Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration responded to Biden’s remark in a statement to Fox News, noting that the true “sin” is pushing permanent surgeries and so-called gender-affirming treatments on children.

“The ‘gender-affirming’ model pushed by the Biden Administration is decades behind other developed countries, including Sweden and most recently Norway,” Florida Agency for Health Care Administration secretary Jason Weida said.

“What is ‘sinful’ is the establishment pushing harmful surgeries and treatment with long-term effects on minors with no accountability or transparency,” Weida continued, referencing the agency’s review of the procedures promoted by the Biden administration and transgender activists, which found that such treatments — from puberty blockers to surgeries —  are not “safe or effective” but “experimental and investigational.”

Weida continued:

Last year, the Agency conducted a thorough review of several services promoted by the Federal Government to treat gender dysphoria and found that these services – sex reassignment surgery, cross-sex hormones, and puberty blockers – are not consistent with widely accepted professional medical standards and are experimental and investigational with the potential for harmful long term effects.

“Studies presenting the benefits to mental health, including those claiming that the services prevent suicide, are either low or very low quality and rely on unreliable methods such as surveys and retrospective analyses, both of which are cross-sectional and highly biased,” the report reads, concluding that these so-called treatments are not grounded in science. Shortly after the release of the review, Florida opted to prohibit Medicaid from covering transgender procedures, and last month, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) promised that he would work with the legislature to establish accountability on those who perform such procedures on minors.

As Breitbart News reported:

“And in fact it’s not evidence based,” DeSantis said, explaining that his administration has worked through the medical licensing board “to say that you in the state of Florida, if you’re performing those procedures, on these minors, you’re gonna lose your medical license here in Florida.”

“So that is happening,” he said to applause, adding that his administration will work with the legislature “to make sure that we put that into statute so that you’re able to have accountability in that sphere.”

“The way to deal with that is to provide whatever counseling is needed, not to hack off their body parts. That is not a solution to the problem. That is mutilation, and it is wrong,” DeSantis concluded.

The DeSantis War Room concurred, releasing a montage showcasing some of the most egregious examples of such “treatments” on Tuesday in response to Biden’s critique: