The Washington state House approved a bill that would authorize state agencies to hide children seeking transgender medical intervention from parents.
On April 12, House lawmakers debated Senate Bill 5599 (pdf), which creates an exemption for the state that grants it the right to not be required to notify parents of minors who have left their homes because their parents wouldn’t let them pursue gender transition medical procedures.
In a video statement after the vote, Republican state Rep. Chris Corry said the bill “erodes parental rights in the state of Washington.”
“Essentially what the bill would do would be if a child left a parents’ home for certain medical care and went to a shelter or host family, that shelter or host family would not be required to notify the parents of their child’s whereabouts,” Corry said. “This is obviously a fundamental violation of parental rights and something that’s deeply concerning for parents across Washington state.”
State Rep. Peter Abbarno, a Republican, said the crux of the debate over the bill was whether the state be permitted to “essentially hide where the child is.”
Most parents, Corry said, would “go to the ends of the earth to find their child” if they disappeared after an argument.
“And the fact that we have a bill that may become law that would say, ‘we’re not going to tell you,’ was really just a bridge too far for us,” Corry said.
Corry told The Epoch Times that, under the bill, a disagreement between a child and parents over the child’s desire for a medical transition constitutes “abuse and neglect,” only because the parent hasn’t “properly affirmed what the child wants.”
Corry said there are already laws that protect children from abuse and neglect in the state that require “solid and compelling reasons” why children would need to be removed from their homes.
“What’s frustrating is even in those cases, the parents still have a right to know where their kids are after they’ve been removed,” Corry said. “In this case, parents would have no idea.”
