The State Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing yesterday on a bill to make Rhode Island a safe haven for abortion and gender-affirming care.

The Senate bill, S2262, was sponsored earlier last month by Democrate Senator Dawn Euer. Hearings on the House companion bill, HB7577, were held on March 5th.

The proposed legislation comes amid growing public awareness that children are being used as guinea pigs to test out a radical “no-questions-asked” model for treating gender dysphoria. Abandoning the traditional protocol of “watching and waiting,” doctors now “affirm” a child’s stated desire to change genders by prescribing puberty-blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones, and irreversible surgeries.

Far too many children come to regret these life-altering treatments. They “detransition”—and increasingly file lawsuits against the doctors they allege caused permanent damage to their health. In fact, Rhode Island is the legal battleground in two high-stakes detransitioner cases we covered here.

If passed, the “Healthcare Provider Shield Act” will insulate Rhode Island doctors and their patients from civil and criminal complaints filed in other states that restrict these surgeries and treatments.

As we explained here, the law sets up a series of protections against such “hostile litigation.”

First of all, would-be out-of-state litigants risk retaliatory lawsuits. The law creates a cause of action for tortious interference with legally protected healthcare activity. So if someone sues a Rhode Island doctor in another state’s court over performing an abortion or transgender surgery, that doctor can sue them back for damages and attorneys’ fees.

• Blocking discovery in out-of-state hostile litigation — The proposed legislation says a Rhode Island court may not order someone here to comply with out-of-state requests for discovery, e.g., testimony, documents. And a judge may not issue a subpoena in connection with hostile litigation. Nor can it order wiretapping or eavesdropping related to abortion or transgender care. The same goes for search warrants. — That means health care providers and their patients will not have to share information with out-of-state law enforcement agencies or litigants from states where abortion and transgender care are not protected.
• Forbidding any public agency from cooperating with interstate investigations or abortion or transgender care.
• Prohibiting extradition of non-fugitives engaging in legally protected healthcare activitity — For example, in the case of a doctor sued from another state, unless the accused doctor was physically present in the state that seeks to have him extradited and then fled to Rhode Island, the authorities are not allowed to surrender him to that state.

The law also protects doctors from losing their licenses or medical malpractice insurance coverage over their abortion or transgender care services.

Above all, the proposed law sends a message to Rhode Island abortion and transgender healthcare providers: Politicians have their back. If passed, the Shield Act will essentially make them an untouchable class of defendants when sued from another state.

Supporters of the bill said doctors are entitled to that protection. “We need to be able to continue to do our jobs without fear,” testified Beth Cronin, a board-certified OB GYN … And we deserve to be able to provide unrestricted, evidence-based healthcare without fear of legal repercussions.” [*Testimony transcript is auto-generated and may contain errors.]

Liz DeSilva, a nurse practitioner, said the law is necessary to give providers “the ability to continue to provide legal and evidence-based health care without fear of persecution from laws that aren’t based on science.” DeSilva spoke on behalf of the Thundermist Health Center, a defendant in one of the Rhode Island detransitioner lawsuits we covered here. “If we can’t support and protect our providers,” she warned, “why would they stay here?”

That theat—that abortion and transgender healthcare providers will flee the state in fear if the law doesn’t pass—was raised repeatedly throughout the hearings. Family physician Kate De Klerk predicted a healthcare crisis: “If we can’t protect providers from this kind of infringement on our ability to practice legal standard of care medicine, what’s to stop primary care doctors from going to Massachusetts or Connecticut where this is in place? The last thing we need is to lose more primary care doctors in this state.”

But those doctors are doing far more harm than good, the bill’s opponents argued.

As the recently published World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) files obtained by journalist Michael Shellenberger revealed, the so-called “medically appropriate evidence-based care” advocated by Senator Euer turns out to be neither:

THE WPATH FILES

Advocates of gender-affirming care say it’s evidence-based.

But now, newly released internal files from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) prove that the practice of transgender medicine is neither scientific nor medical.

American… pic.twitter.com/mcJ2E7TezW

— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) March 4, 2024

That was the point Robert Chiaradio drove home in his testimony opposing the bill. Bob was out in full force with Legal Insurrection co-stars Nicole Solas and Ramona Bessinger.

Self-serving gender-affirming care doctors are causing lifelong damage to their pediatric patients knowing full well what the WPATH files exposed—their treatments are anything but “scientific”:

WPATH files just released prove that leaders of transgender medicine knew that they’d been putting children at risk for permanent mental and physical harm for years with their unethical and unscientific practices in this field. Yet they’ve kept doing it. Why?

…

They take advantage of the trust these impressionable young people have in them, either to fulfill some sick agenda, or to line their pockets, or both. This is a very lucrative field for the medical industry, and some in it are willing to sacrifice these kids in order to rake it in. Every honest health care professional knows minors are not little kids. All adults know they are incapable of knowing how they are going to feel five years later. Their brains are not developed enough to look ahead that far. One must be 18 to drink, or to vote, yet they can have their minds and bodies. Bodies destroyed by these unethical people at a much younger age as these cowards hide behind the term of gender affirming care.

Nicole Solas testified on behalf of Dr. Michelle Cretella, a pediatric consultant to attorneys representing detransitioners in litigation against gender-affirming care doctors. Cretella was unable to attend, so she read Cretella’s written testimony into the record.

Cretella detailed the gruesome consequences faced by detransitioners—consequences none of the other cheerleaders for the bill wanted to talk about:

Most detransitioners are now women in their 20s who have suffered permanent damage including painful sexual intercourse, inability to o*****, broken voices, 5 o’clock shadows, feeling like a freak, extreme anxiety knowing they may be infertile and or never nurse a baby. Depression and anxiety regarding their poor long term health due to years on toxic levels of testosterone.

Every detransitioner was a gender dysphoric youth who fell prey to social contagion. And doctors who pushed them to transition while ignoring their histories of mental illness and traumas up to and including sexual abuse which predated and likely caused their gender dysphoria.

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[WPATH] health professionals knew that by an average age of 32 years old, 27% of children transitioned and young with puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones and surgeries express regret over sacrificing their fertility. And a recent study out of Finland proves that suicide in trans youth is due to unresolved mental illnesses and that gender reassignment does not reduce suicide.

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Seven international studies of the highest scientific quality conclude that gender transition in minors is experimental at best. Risk of harm to youth from transition is high. Youth placed on puberty blockers in cross-sex hormones states elevated risk across their lifespan including but not limited to infertility, bone loss, blood clots, stroke, heart attack cancers and more including suicide.

Gender-affirming care, Cretella said, echoing others, is the infamous lobotomy of our times.

Veteran schoolteacher Ramona Bessinger spoke with experience on how easily kids can be convinced of anything, including the lie that they were born in the wrong body.

We need to listen to the detransitioners filing these lawsuits, she explained, not fight against them:

What is happening is that kids are being persuaded from a very early age in schools to try out different genders. This is being glorified and in fact sold. In a manner of speaking to young people who are much too young to be making decisions that could alter their bodies and their minds, you know, forever.

There’s no returning from this process. It’s big money for the doctors who are speaking tonight, they are making tremendous amount of money at the hands of this experimental procedure, procedures which by the way has many sort of adverse long-term effects.

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So it’s great for the medical industry because the medical industry is getting very wealthy at the hands of confused and often vulnerable children who are being funneled sex transition. What I feel feel is very much like a cult.

We’re overlooking all the warning signs. They’re all there. They are detransitioners popping up all over the country for good reason and we need to pay attention to that. These are young people who have been steered wrong.

And that is why the proponents of the Shield Act have it backwards, Solas said on Cretella’s behalf. “Rhode Island must protect vulnerable patients, not the doctors who knowingly harmed them.”

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