US House passes bill to ban genital mutilation of minors: What is Protect Children’s Innocence Act?

The US House of Representatives passed the Protect Children’s Innocence Act on Wednesday. It seeks to ban “genital or bodily mutilation of a minor.” The bill would effectively ban gender-affirming treatments for transgender children.

The bill, sponsored by right-wing firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene (MTG), was approved by 216 votes to 211 and now heads to the Senate, where its fate is less certain.

Greene’s bill would make it a federal crime to conduct a variety of procedures. “My bill, Protect Children’s Innocence Act, would make it a felony to perform ‘gender affirming care’ or ‘trans’ minors under 18,” Greene said in a post on X.

While explicitly criminalising female genital mutilation (FGM), the bill also targets surgeries meant to change a minor’s body “to correspond to a sex that differs from their biological sex.”

It also forbids some pharmacological forms of gender-affirming care, such as puberty blockers.

Anyone performing or facilitating such practices faces up to 10 years in prison and fines under the bill.

“This important bill…will criminalise gender-affirming care on minors, not adults, on minors who have not yet grown up to make adult decisions,” Greene said ahead of the vote.

Representative Cory Mills, who voted in favour of the bill, said the Protect Children’s Innocence Act “strengthens federal law to ensure minors are protected from irreversible bodily harm, including genital mutilation and chemical castration.”

Trump campaigned aggressively last year against transgender-related policies, and set out early in his second term to roll back provisions recognising diverse gender identities.

His administration has sought to ban transgender people from the military and cut funds from schools allowing transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports.

Democrat Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender person elected to Congress, denounced the bill.

“All Republican politicians care about is making the rich richer and attacking trans people,” the Delaware representative told reporters outside the Capitol.

The Advocates for Trans Equality (A4TE), a transgender rights group, said the bill “attempts to strip both transgender and intersex people of their freedom to make decisions about their own bodies.”

The group noted the bill still allows surgeries on intersex children, who are born with both female and male genitals, calling them “non-consensual surgeries that are actual cases of mutilation.”

The bill “is not about protecting children — it is about enforcing outdated ideas of sex and gender through coercion and violence,” said A4TE health policy analyst Sinead Murano-Kinney.