By Sarah Morland
(Reuters) -Argentina’s presidential office said on Wednesday that President Javier Milei had taken the decision to ban gender change treatments and surgeries for minors, as well as impose limits on trans women being housed inside women’s prisons.
In a press conference, presidential spokesperson Manuel Adorni said the ban would include hormone therapy and followed similar pushbacks in legislation on trans rights in countries such as the UK, Sweden, Finland and the United States, and sought to protect children’s mental health.
The announcement comes days after thousands of Argentines protested in favor of LGBT+ rights after Milei made a speech in Davos, Switzerland, in which he questioned “feminism, diversity, inclusion, abortion, environmentalism and gender ideology”, calling progressive policies a “cancer that must be extirpated.”
“The president cannot modify a law by decree. And if he tries we will go to the judiciary and the Inter-American Court if necessary,” the Argentina LGBT+ Federation said on X, noting that the existing law does not allow gender surgery for minors.
“Gender ideology taken to extremes and applied to children by force or psychological coercion clearly constitutes child abuse,” the office said in a statement.
Gender surgeries are very rarely performed on children worldwide, and trans minors must generally be medically evaluated and diagnosed with gender dysphoria before starting puberty blockers or hormonal therapies.
Milei, a far-right libertarian, will also decree that prisoners be housed according to their gender registered at the time of committing the crime, his office said.
Regardless of this, it added, no trans woman will be housed in a women’s prison if convicted for sexual crimes, human trafficking or violent crimes against women.
“This decision will permit a much more reasonable system that guarantees the security of all women inmates and ends the insanity pushed by the nefarious gender ideology,” Adorni said.
Milei’s office did not give details on how many trans women were housed in women’s prisons or convicted of such crimes, nor did it say how the change would affect intersex people, who are born with non-binary biological characteristics.
The announcement came shortly after a U.S. judge blocked an executive order that President Donald Trump signed on his first day in office that would move the 16 trans women housed in women’s prisons to men’s institutions, and end their gender-affirming care. Most trans women in the U.S. are in men’s prisons.
(Reporting by Sarah Morland; Editing by Kylie Madry and Sandra Maler)
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