COLUMBIA — Republican South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster signed into law a bill May 21 banning the provision or performance of gender transition procedures on minors by medical professionals with some exceptions.
House Bill 4624, sometimes called the "Help Not Harm" bill, prohibits health care providers in the state from performing certain types of hormonal or surgical gender reassignments on persons under 18. The bill does include an exemption for providing minors "appropriate medical service" unrelated to gender transition, such as prescribing puberty blockers or hormone therapy for other conditions including precocious puberty, certain types of cancers, endometriosis, or sexual development issues.
According to The Associated Press, the state becomes the 25th to pass such legislation, and leaves Virginia as the only state in the South that has not.
"I signed the Help Not Harm bill into law, which protects our state's children from irreversible gender transition procedures and bans public funds from being used for them," McMaster wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
He added there would be "a ceremonial bill signing in the Upstate next week."
Michael F. Acquilano, director of the South Carolina Catholic Conference, said in a May 23 statement the conference "is relieved that children will soon be protected from the harmful effects of gender transition practices."
He said, "In recent years, we have seen more and more children being given cross-sex hormones, puberty blockers and even mastectomies and other sex-change operations. It is unconscionable to do this to our children. We must allow them to go through puberty naturally without altering their healthy bodies."
Jace Woodrum, executive director of the ACLU of South Carolina, said in a statement, "We stand in grief and solidarity with LGBTQ South Carolinians, who are increasingly under attack by our own government."
"We can put to rest the notion that the governor cares about limited government and personal freedom," Woodrum said. "With the stroke of a pen, he has chosen to insert the will of politicians into healthcare decisions, trample on the liberties of trans South Carolinians, and deny the rights of the parents of trans minors."
A 2022 study by the UCLA Williams Institute found that there are approximately 1.6 million people in the U.S. who identify as transgender, with nearly half of that population between the ages of 13 and 24.
According to Greenville News, Dr. Elizabeth Mack, president of the South Carolina chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics and who testified against the bill in February, said there were "less than 2,000 trans kids in the state."
In guidance on health care policy and practices released in March 2023, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee on Doctrine opposed interventions that "involve the use of surgical or chemical techniques that aim to exchange the sex characteristics of a patient's body for those of the opposite sex or for simulations thereof."
"Any technological intervention that does not accord with the fundamental order of the human person as a unity of body and soul, including the sexual difference inscribed in the body, ultimately does not help but, rather, harms the human person," the document states.
— Kate Scanlon, OSV News