Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis suspended Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren, in part, for signing a pledge against the criminalization of gender-affirming health care.
Although Florida has not enacted any law prohibiting transgender medical treatment for children, DeSantis cited Warren's pledge not to prosecute doctors who offer these services as evidence of his neglect of duty.
DeSantis has mocked the term "gender-affirming care," which the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services says can include medical, surgical and mental health services for transgender and nonbinary people.
"When you have the 2021 letter saying … no matter what a state declares about protecting child welfare with respect, I mean, you know, they use these euphemisms," DeSantis said at an Aug. 4 press briefing announcing the suspension. "But what it is, is they're literally chopping off the private parts of young kids, and that's wrong."
This isn't the first time DeSantis suggested that "young kids" in the U.S. receive transition-related surgeries. DeSantis criticized these procedures in an Aug. 3 conference:
"They want to castrate these young boys, that's wrong. We stood up and said, from the health and children's well-being perspective, you don't disfigure 10, 12, 13-year-old kids based on gender dysphoria."
We found no examples of doctors "literally chopping off the private parts of young kids," as DeSantis said.
"That is not true under any existing medical guidelines," said Dr. Jack Turban, assistant professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco. "No medical or surgical interventions are considered for prepubertal children."
The governor's office sent PolitiFact two examples of people who received transition-related surgeries in their mid to late teenage years — one at 15 and one at 17. DeSantis' Florida Department of Health differentiates between children (under 10) and adolescents (10-18).
In one case DeSantis provided, an individual from California received masculinizing chest surgery at 15. Under existing California law, an insurer cannot deny coverage for the surgery — which includes double mastectomies — based on a patient's age alone.
The procedure is mostly offered to teenagers 15 and older, The New York Times reported. However, we found one report of a 14-year-old who obtained the procedure, and there isn't a consensus on a specific age requirement among medical guidelines.
The other case involved Jazz Jennings, a transgender woman who stars in a reality television show on TLC. Jennings received genital reassignment surgery at 17.
Genital reassignment surgery should be reserved for those 18 and older, according to guidelines for the medical care of transgender patients developed by the Endocrine Society and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH.