The lieutenant governor of Minnesota, speaking at an event where Democrat Governor Tim Walz signed an executive order forcing state agencies to protect “gender-affirming” health care, including surgery, admonished parents not to dissuade their children from such health care, eliciting mockery from conservatives.
Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan addressed the crowd as she wore a shirt that read “Protect Trans Kids” with a picture of a dagger on it.
“Let’s be clear: this is life-affirming and life-saving health care,” she declared. “When our children tell us who they are, it is our job as grown-ups to listen and to believe them. That’s what it means to be a good parent.”
MN Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan on sex changes for minors: "When our children tell us who they are, it is our job as grown-ups to listen and to believe them. That's what it means to be a good parent." pic.twitter.com/WNXjGRgjsm
— Alpha News (@AlphaNewsMN) March 15, 2023
Flanagan’s insistence that parents abandon their roles at guiding their young children in such delicate matters angered conservatives.
When your 6 year old says they are Frankenstein, you must super glue bolts to their neck and hook up the jump cables. https://t.co/AZgSTtpfKp
— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) March 16, 2023
My job as a parent is to protect my kids from ghouls who would let them mutilate themselves before they are old enough to make life-changing decisions for themselves
If 9 year olds can decide to chop off their parts, why not allow them to drink, drive 18 wheelers, or pole dance?
— Philip Holloway ✈️ (@PhilHollowayEsq) March 16, 2023
No. Our job as grown-ups is to protect our children from harm… which often comes from their lack of understanding and experience in the world. Good parents will keep their children safe from people like this.
— Douglas Karr (@douglaskarr) March 16, 2023
“People who struggle with their gender identity deserve compassionate care that will help them become comfortable in their bodies, not mutilate them,” John Helmberger, CEO of the Minnesota Family Council, reacted to the executive order.
Walz called the efforts by states around the nation to restrict “gender-affirming” care “persecution,” ventilating, “We’ll make sure that Minnesota’s place as a welcoming, loving, neighborly state where you are welcome and will be free of persecution or anything else that we’re trying to see in some other states.”
He singled out Minnesota’s next-door neighbor, South Dakota, where Gov. Kristi Noem signed a bill banning the prescription of puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and sex-change surgeries for minors in February.
“I don’t know what a group of people in Pierre who decide to make life miserable and more dangerous for people are thinking, but it’s not going to happen in Minnesota,” Walz boasted.
Minnesota’s state house will consider a bill from a transgender representative that would make Minnesota a “trans refuge state” and would bar the state from obeying court orders or child protection laws from other states that would block them from “gender-affirming” health care in Minnesota.
In another state adjoining Minnesota, the Iowa senate passed a bill barring doctors from providing puberty blockers, hormone therapy, or sex-change surgeries to children under the age of 18.
Arkansas was the first state to ban sex-change procedures in 2021; Utah followed in January 2021. Florida’s Board of Medicine and Board of Osteopathic Medicine, with the encouragement of Governor Ron DeSantis, banned sex-change procedures for children under 18; GOP Governors Tate Reeves of Mississippi and Bill Lee of Tennessee have signed bills banning sex-change procedures for minors.