Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Tuesday responded after President Biden criticized Florida for making efforts to protect children from transgender surgeries and so-called “gender-affirming” treatments.
“It is not ‘sinful’ to prohibit the mutilation of minors,” DeSantis said in response to Biden, who lamented the state of affairs in Florida during an interview on The Daily Show.
“What’s going on in Florida is, as my mother would say, close to sinful. It’s just terrible what they’re doing,” Biden told Kal Penn.
“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 said, ultimately suggesting that it is “cruel” to protect children from transgender surgeries or hormone treatments.
DeSantis further responded to Biden’s comments, “It is not acceptable for the federal government to mandate that procedures like sex change operations be allowed for kids.”
Florida’s Agency for Health Care Administration also responded to Biden’s remarks and cited its report released last year, which found that so-called transgender procedures — from surgeries to puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones — are not grounded in science but “experimental and investigational.”
“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, explaining that the true transgression is “pushing harmful surgeries and treatment with long-term effects on minors with no accountability or transparency.”
