The latest step that Tennessee has taken toward protecting children from making life-ruining decisions occurred on Thursday. The State House passed a bill banning sex-change procedures in a 77-16 vote. Governor Bill Lee, who has made positive noises about the legislation, is expected to sign the bill.

This bill sprung into existence in response to some disturbing videos and offerings from Vanderbilt University Medical Center. Political pundit Matt Walsh systematically exposed VCMU’s pediatric gender clinic in a series of social media posts. In October 2022, VCMU paused all such surgeries after being questioned by Tennessee Republican lawmakers.

This new bill protects children from going under the knife and having their healthy reproductive organs mutilated, protects them from being given puberty-blocking hormones, and protects them from medicine that essentially castrates them. The prime victims for these procedures are children who are under the impression that they are in the “wrong” body; that they are actually the opposite sex. This is called “gender dysphoria” and it’s classified as a mental illness. It was most commonly seen in extremely young boys in very small numbers but has exploded especially in the teen girl demographic due to the power of suggestion through activists and social contagion.

This social contagion, spurred on by its acolytes both in the culture and at school, has fostered an epidemic of kids using this self-diagnosis of “transgenderism” as a way to explain the identity crisis all kids deal with as they enter puberty. Children, under the influence of adults, TikTok, or simply trying to fit in at school, have decided that they are “transgender” (a boy in a girl’s body or vice versa). These children, instead of having their delusions dispelled by proper healthy counseling, have suffered under the faddish new treatment method medical professionals have been adopting called “gender-affirming care.”

“Gender-denying care” is a more proper description of what is actually happening. These confused children go to a doctor, who refers them to a psychologist, who after a visit or two gets them started down the medical rabbit hole that these medical professionals and activists call “life-saving.” That is how they have convinced parents to go along with this madness. A common refrain that they tell these parents who have watched their child go off the deep end of this ideology in their search for identity is, Would you rather have a living son or a dead daughter? (Or vice versa). These “life-saving” treatments are really life-shattering.

In reality, the hormone treatments, puberty blockers, medical castrations, and surgical alterations that are causing serious medical side effects are not helping these kids in the long run but are feeding the medical machine a steady income. Essentially, these kids are being bilked into becoming lifelong dependents of the medical establishment.

In talking about why the Tennessee House passed this bill, House Majority Leader William Lamberth said: “Let’s be clear: these treatments and surgeries are cosmetic. No procedure or drug can change a human being’s sex, the structure of their chromosomes or their DNA. It is surgical mutilation for the purpose of altering the appearance of a child and it qualifies as nothing less than abuse.”

Tennessee is a majority-Republican state. However, this issue of protecting vulnerable, impressionable children who can’t consent to anything legally should be a bipartisan issue.

In a sane society, this sort of bill would never be needed. It would be intuitive to all that children should not be permitted or duped into mutilating their bodies and causing irreversible damage. In a sane world, children wouldn’t be told that there are hundreds of genders and that they can become whatever they want with a few dollars and some surgery and pills.

Legislators in Tennessee are continuing to fight against this insane ideology that calls mutilation “affirmation” and opposition to their worldview “hateful” and “phobic.” Those people who are using our children as justification for their life choices and as a weird sort of trophy for their flaunting of their fetishes are sick and should be stopped. The next Tennessee bill regarding this issue is Senate Bill 3, which bans sexual performances for minors (which includes drag shows).

Tennessee is saying, Hands off our children. Will other states follow its lead? Florida probably isn’t far behind.