You may have heard that legislative attacks on transgendered people have been on the rise. During legislative sessions in 2024, more such bills were active than in any previous year. According to the Trans Legislation Tracker, 672 bills were introduced or carried over from previous years, and this year was the fifth year in a row with more bills than any previous year.
I spent some time studying these bills, and one stood out to me. The State of Minnesota House of Representatives filed H. F. No 3264, a bill for an act titled the “PROM (Protect Reproductive Organs of Minors) Act.” Before I get into what the bill says, let’s just pause together for a moment to imagine what it might have been like for a group of republican lawmakers to sit together trying to come up with catchy acronyms, and this is what they settle on.
The full bill is only two pages long, and I’m including a PDF copy linked below if you want to check it out. But the operative part of it is as follows:
A health care practitioner who performs any of the following practices upon a minor, or who causes such practices to be performed upon a minor, for the purpose of attempting to change the minor’s sex or for the purpose of affirming the minor’s perception of the minor’s sex if that perception is inconsistent with the minor’s sex, commits a felony in the first degree:
(a) surgeries that sterilize, including castration, vasectomy, hysterectomy, oophorectomy, metoidioplasty, orchiectomy, penectomy, phalloplasty, and vaginoplasty; mastectomy;
(b) administering, prescribing, or supplying the following medications that induce transient or permanent infertility:
(1) puberty-blocking medication, which stops or delays normal puberty;
(2) supraphysiologic doses of testosterone, to females; or
(3) supraphysiologic doses of estrogen, to males; or
(c) removing any otherwise healthy or nondiseased body part or tissue.
Unfortunately, this kind of language is pretty standard in these anti-trans healthcare bills. Fortunately, this bill did not pass, but if it did, then when a doctor or other healthcare provider followed the commonly understood best practices for care of a transgendered child and—after all the normal tests and screenings and whatever else doctors do to before suggesting a serious medical intervention—offers surgery or hormone treatment, they would be guilty of a felony.
But none of that is why this bill stood out to me. Really, it was just the title.
Protecting Reproductive Organs of Minors
First, the title suggests that the intent is to “protect reproductive organs of minors.” Now, I’m in full agreement that kids deserve to be protected from harmful stuff. And obviously there’s a cogent argument to be made that denying access to healthcare is probably never a good way to protect anyone from anything. But even without getting into that, there’s just something creepy to me about the idea of the full force of the criminal law bringing its protective force explicitly and exclusively on kids’ genitals.
Like, if you want to protect minors, ok, great. Do it. But that’s not what this bill claims to do. By its very title, it’s only interested in protecting their reproductive organs. This bill sees a girl as nothing but a uterus, breasts, and source of eggs. Likewise, the bill sees a boy as nothing but a penis and a source of sperm. The result is that children are denied their psychological needs and experiences, reduced to baby-making facilities for the greater good.
There’s probably an argument to be made about sexualizing children and legislating a need for their fertility, but I’ll let someone else address that.
Prom
Candace Chen (2012) posits that high school prom is an American ritual that evolved out of bourgeoisie traditions in colleges and universities. It has been mythologized in teen romances and other popular media as a rite of passage often culminating in a loss of virginity, or at least that’s what many young men desperately hope for (Best 2004).
It seems clear that the authors of the PROM Act imagine prom as a cultural touchpoint that emphasizes the normativity of teen romance and—they would hope—pregnancy during high school. Because the ritual of prom is centered in white middle class American culture, there is an easy presumption that promoting (heterosexual) fertility in relation to prom would be in the service of a white nationalist political ideology (Craigo-Snell 2024).
While the PROM Act is facially interested in antagonizing the LGBTQ+ rights movement and forcibly erasing transgendered children from the state of Minnesota, I believe it is designed to further a nationalist goal of increasing white fertility and teen pregnancy.
References
Best, Amy L. 2004. “The Production of Heterosexuality at the High School Prom.” In Thinking Straight. Routledge.
Chen, Candace. 2012. “Prom: How a High School Ritual Brought Youth Closer to Adulthood, 1890-1970.” UC Berkeley. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/96n4586k.
Craigo-Snell, Shannon. 2024. “The Theological Anthropology of Dobbs: Women in Service to White Nationalism.” Anglican Theological Review 106 (3): 301–18. https://doi.org/10.1177/00033286241270478.
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