The South Carolina Senate voted 28-8 Thursday to protect minors from gender transition procedures by passing the Help Not Harm bill (H. 4624). The legislation passed despite Democratic efforts to derail the bill, and it now heads to the statehouse. The legislation “protects our culture and our society, not just protecting them from harm, but a complete violation of who they are, their identity,” Palmetto Family Council President Steve Pettit told The Washington Stand. “It’s an acceptance of who we are by creation. It protects our whole society from accepting something that is not true.”
H.4624 would protect minors from puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries “provided for the purpose of assisting an individual with a physical gender transition.” It includes a full array of civil enforcement mechanisms and would also make “genital gender reassignment surgery” on a minor a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison. The law would also prohibit the use of public funds and Medicaid coverage for gender transition procedures and allow parents to be notified if their child was changing his or her gender identity at school.
“There are some things in the nature of creation … that gets beyond what you believe and I believe,” stated state Senator Richard Cash (R). “Male and female is one of them. … It’s rooted in creation. It’s rooted in the Creator, and those who opposed to that are opposing, in some sense, the nature of creation itself.”
Opponents of the bill tried to delay the final vote until the chamber adjourned on Thursday evening. They proposed a series of poison-pill amendments, each of which the House voted down in turn. “Democrats tried to walk out so there wouldn’t be enough senators to stay in session,” reported the Associated Press. According to the official record, “At 6:09 P.M., Senator [Brad] Hutto [D] made the point that a quorum was not present.”
Unfortunately for Hutto, the record added, “It was ascertained that a quorum was present.” In the South Carolina Senate, 24 out of 46 senators comprise a quorum. Only 10 senators (three Republicans and seven Democrats) were absent for the ensuing vote (28-8). “Our allies worked extremely hard to make sure this bill got across the finish line,” said Mitch Prosser, director of Policy and Church Engagement for Palmetto Family Council.
The South Carolina House already overwhelmingly passed H. 4624 in January (82-23). However, the Senate amended the bill, which means the House must reconsider it to approve those amendments. The Senate 1) extended the Medicaid prohibition from youth gender transition procedures to all gender transition procedures, 2) required school officials to “immediately notify” parents if their child begins to identify as transgender at school, 3) clarified that the bill does not prohibit “appropriate medical services to a person for precocious puberty, prostate cancer, breast cancer, endometriosis, or other procedure unrelated to gender transition,” and 4) added a severability clause. “The amendments were not detrimental to the bill,” Prosser told TWS.
Thursday’s vote continued a pattern of South Carolina Democrats crossing the aisle to vote for this measure protecting minors from gender transition procedures. In the earlier House vote, two Democratic representatives voted for the Help Not Harm bill; on Thursday, one Democratic senator voted for it too.
The Democrat who voted to protect minors from gender transition procedures was Senator Kent Williams (D). Williams “votes with his caucus 95% of the time,” Prosser explained, but “he has crossed over on life issues” and other issues of Christian morality. Williams is a member of St. James African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Marion, as well as a steward there (an AME role similar to a deacon). While it historically favors Democrats, the predominantly black AME denomination has not followed the party’s recent leftward lurch on social issues; it opposes elective abortion and same-sex marriage, although it has ordained people who identify as LGBT as clergy.
Beginning in 2021, 24 states have enacted legislation to protect minors from the harmful, irreversible effects of gender transition procedures, with the vast majority of those laws coming in 2023. These states have recognized the lack of scientific data supporting these procedures, as well as European countries like Sweden and France that have backed away from these procedures based upon years of experience. If the South Carolina legislature successfully passes H.4624, it would join a growing number of states, including neighboring Georgia and North Carolina, that have taken concrete steps to protect minors from gender transition procedures.
Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand.
