Protecting Our Kids from Child Abuse Act

Protecting Our Kids from Child Abuse Act

This bill retroactively makes certain health care facilities and medical practitioners liable for any physical, psychological, emotional, or physiological harms caused by performing a gender-transition procedure on an individual who is younger than 18. The liability extends for 30 years after the individual who received the procedure turns 18, and it applies to procedures that occurred prior to the enactment of the bill.

Specifically, the liability applies to

• pediatric gender clinics (medical facilities specializing in the diagnosis and treatment of gender discordance and dysphoria in minors) that provide gender-transition procedures;
• institutions of higher education and hospitals affiliated with those clinics, and
• medical practitioners who perform gender-transition procedures and those who administer health care related to the procedures at pediatric gender clinics.

Medical practitioners and health care facilities may defend against a liability claim if they neither knew nor had reason to know the individual was a minor.

Additionally, the bill prohibits federal funding for (1) gender-transition procedures performed on minors, (2) pediatric gender clinics, and (3) institutions of higher education or hospitals affiliated with those clinics.

Under the bill, gender-transition procedures generally include surgeries or hormone therapies that change the body of an individual to correspond to a sex that is different than the individual's biological sex. They exclude, however, specified types of interventions, including those that address (1) ambiguous external biological sex characteristics or abnormal sex chromosome structure or hormones; or (2) infections or other harms that result from a gender-transition procedure.

Written by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. All summary versions on Congress.gov