Sponsors (67)
The bill prioritizes protecting minors from gender‑affirming medical interventions and expands civil remedies for harmed individuals, but does so by imposing broad, potentially retroactive liability and litigation risk that could reduce access to pediatric and mental‑health services and raise costs for providers, patients, and taxpayers.
Children under 18 are barred from receiving puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or sex‑altering surgeries, reducing the risk that minors undergo these irreversible medical interventions.
Children who received covered interventions (or their parents) can sue in federal court for compensation, including non-economic and potentially punitive damages, increasing access to remedies and deterrence against prohibited practices.
People subjected to covered interventions as children get extended filing windows (up to 25 years after turning 18 and four years from incurring detransition costs), giving survivors more time to bring claims when harms or costs appear later in life.
Health professionals, hospitals, and clinics face strict and potentially retroactive liability exposure, raising malpractice risk and likely increasing insurance premiums and healthcare costs or reducing service availability.
Minors with gender dysphoria may lose access to medically recommended treatments endorsed by some professional societies, which could worsen mental‑health outcomes for those patients.
Clinicians may avoid providing related diagnostic, follow‑up, consultative, or referral services for fear of being construed as participating in a prohibited intervention, reducing access to general pediatric and mental‑health care for minors.
Based on analysis of 6 sections of legislative text.
Prohibits a set of medical treatments for people under 18 that are intended to delay puberty, change sexual characteristics, or surgically alter sex organs, while carving out several narrow medical exceptions. It establishes a federal private right of action allowing a child (or their parent/legal guardian) to sue health care professionals, hospitals, or clinics for any such covered intervention, including those performed before enactment, and provides compensatory, non‑economic, and punitive damages. The bill defines covered interventions (puberty blockers, cross‑sex hormones, certain surgeries), creates strict liability for interventions done after enactment, shifts burdens of proof for defenses to providers, sets extended time limits to file suit, and includes rules that limit waiver of liability and constrain how professional standards are used in court.
Creates a federal right to sue providers for specified puberty‑blocking, hormone, and sex‑related surgeries on minors, allows damages, and extends liability retroactively.
Introduced February 23, 2026 by Robert F. Onder · Last progress February 23, 2026