This bill creates new legal liability for doctors who provide gender-transition medical treatments to patients under 18 years old. If a young person experiences any physical, psychological, emotional, or physiological harm from these treatments, the doctor can be held responsible for up to 30 years after the patient turns 18. This means patients could potentially sue doctors decades later for damages related to these procedures.

The bill also penalizes states that require doctors to perform gender-transition procedures by making them ineligible for federal health funding. Gender-transition procedures under this bill mainly refer to surgeries or hormone therapies designed to change someone's body to match a different sex than their biological sex at birth.

However, the bill does carve out some exceptions. It doesn't apply to treatments for people with certain intersex conditions (where biological sex characteristics are ambiguous or atypical), treatments for infections or injuries caused by a gender-transition procedure, or emergency medical care needed to prevent death or serious bodily harm. The practical effect is that doctors would face significant legal and financial risk when treating transgender minors, which could discourage them from providing these services even when they believe it's medically appropriate.

Protecting Minors from Medical Malpractice Act of 2025

Cotton, Tom

Protecting Minors from Medical Malpractice Act of 2025This bill makes a medical practitioner who performs a gender-transition procedure on an individual who is less than 18 years of age liable for any physical, psychological, emotional, or physiological harms from the procedure for 30 years after the individual turns 18.Additionally, if a state requires medical practitioners to perform gender-transition procedures, that state shall be ineligible for federal funding from the Department of Health and Human Services.Under the bill, gender-transition procedures generally include certain surgeries or hormone therapies that change the body of an individual to correspond to a sex that is discordant with the individual's biological sex. They exclude, however, interventions to treat (1) individuals who either have ambiguous external biological sex characteristics or lack a normal sex chromosome structure, sex steroid hormone production, or sex steroid hormone action; (2) infections, injuries, diseases, or disorders caused by a gender-transition procedure; or (3) a physical disorder, injury, or illness that places an individual in imminent danger of death or impairment of a major bodily function.