A debate is heating up in South Carolina over legislation that would prevent doctors from providing or aiding in gender transition services for minors.

“There are few things we do as legislators that are more important than protecting vulnerable children,” a Republican state representative sponsoring the bill, John McCravy, said on the house floor on Wednesday. “One of these important protections that has arisen and has become necessary is to protect minors from these so-called gender transition procedures.”

South Carolina’s debate is the latest in a wave of transgender-related discussion taking shape across the world, as 22 states have passed similar legislation and the World Health Organization prepares to set global transgender guidelines. 

 “When you look at the whole picture,” Mr. McCravy said, “it becomes clear that affirming transition in children is really about mutilating and sterilizing emotionally troubled youth.”

Democrats and left-leaning civil rights groups are vociferously opposed to the legislation, however.

The bill is “interfering once again in the relationship between a doctor and patient,” a Democratic state representative, Todd Rutherford, said as he spoke against the measure. He said it wasn’t the legislature’s job to “jump into the fray” and decide “what is best for children that are children of God and born in a way that they feel different.” 

He repeatedly urged fellow lawmakers to remember that they aren’t doctors and said the government should strive to stay out of people’s lives. “It is wrong because we continue to get into a relationship that we have no business in,” he said. 

The American Civil Liberties Union of South Carolina said the bill was “rushed” out of committee and would “strip away medically necessary care from transgender youth. 

The organization wrote on X that Mr. McCravy “didn’t even bother writing his own speech introducing the bill to the House. He’s reading junk science verbatim from the website of the American College of Pediatricians, a small anti-LGBTQ organization.” 

A senior counsel for Alliance Defending Freedom, Matt Sharp, who testified in support of the bill, tells the Sun that the priority that lawmakers have given the topic by working to enact it within the first few weeks of session “shows that they see the need for these protections.” 

There is “strong public support” for similar measures throughout the country, he adds. The two key provisions in South Carolina’s legislation are that it outlaws giving children puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and sterilization surgeries, he says, as well as protecting parental rights by ensuring that school employees could not withhold gender identity issues from them. 

“We know that the best thing we can offer to a child is to have their parents involved and helping to make decisions about what they believe is in the best interest of their child,” Mr. Sharp says.

 “I think the tide is very much in favor of laws like this. We’ve seen poll after poll that shows that Americans agree that kids should not be pushed down this dangerous one way street of medicalization,” he says, adding that the focus should instead be on “mental health and psychotherapy that we know can be helpful and does not carry the same risk and dangerous as the puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries.”