(Randy Fine photo in public domain, Downtown Melbourne photo by Michele Haro; both from Wikimedia Commons)
Florida Rep. Randy Fine, a Republican from Brevard County, introduced a bill March 3 that attacks transgender individuals in the state as well as their doctors.
House Bill 1421, “Gender Clinical Interventions,” would prohibit all gender-affirming care for minors, prevent a person from changing the sex marker on their birth certificate and allow health care providers to deny gender-affirming care to adults if refusal of care is based on “clinical, moral or religious grounds” without “any disciplinary or other recriminatory action.”
The bill also prohibits health insurance companies from providing coverage for “gender clinical interventions” for minors and requires doctors “obtain informed written consent from the patient each time the physician provides gender clinical interventions for an adult, sign the consent, and maintain the consent in the medical record” when it comes to adults. The bill will also allow patients 30 years after a procedure to sue their doctor.
“Governor DeSantis and his right-wing allies have made it clear that they do not believe transgender people exist,” said Equality Florida’s Nikole Parker, Director of Transgender Equality, in a press release March 3. “This cruel bill is a transgender ban. It goes beyond denying us medical freedom to policing who we can be. Republican leadership is saying that from the moment of birth, you should not — and in important ways cannot — be recognized by anything other than your genitals. And from that bigoted place of denying the very humanity of transgender Floridians, they are ruthlessly bending the power of government to erase the community altogether. Transgender people are neighbors, friends, family members. We exist and we matter. This bill to rip away lifesaving health care, shred insurance coverage, and bar birth certificate access will cost lives.”
Fine celebrated his bill’s introduction with a post to Facebook saying it “bans the mutilation of children in the name of radical ‘transgender’ theory, bans Florida citizens from having to pay for these procedures for other non-minors, and gives those tricked into this fraud thirty years to sue those who did it to them.”
Fine also filed House Bill 1423, “Protection of Children,” which is a companion bill to Senate Bill 1438 that would authorize the Department of Business and Professional Regulation “to fine, suspend or revoke the license of any public lodging establishment or public food service establishment that admits child to adult live performance.”
“Adult live performance” is defined in the bill as “any show, exhibition, or other presentation in front of a live audience which, in whole or in part, depicts or simulates nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement, specific sexual activities … lewd conduct, or the lewd exposure of prosthetic or imitation genitals or breasts.”
While the term “drag” does not appear in the bill’s text, Fine made it clear in his Facebook post who he was targeting with this legislation.
“HB 1423 which will protect our children by ending the gateway propaganda to this evil – ‘Drag Queen Story Time,’” he wrote.
