A Georgia Republican lawmaker has introduced a bill that would make child transgender surgeries and drugs illegal.

On February 27, Georgia State Rep. Ginny Ehrhart (R) introduced the Vulnerable Child Protection Act (HB 1060) in the Georgia House of Representatives.

The legislation would ban health care professionals from performing transgender surgeries on a minor child – such as mastectomy, vaginoplasty, castration, penectomy, etc. – “for the purpose of attempting to affirm the minor’s perception of such minor’s sex, if that perception is inconsistent with such minor’s sex.”

In addition, the bill would make illegal the administering of medications, such as puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones, to children for the same purpose.

“This form of child abuse is becoming a serious problem in Georgia and is evolving into a national crisis,” Ehrhart told the local CBS affiliate about her bill in October. She added:

We are talking about children who have not reached the legal age of consent yet are being subjected to life-altering, irreversible surgeries and drug treatments that render them sterile and permanently disfigured. The psychological damage this does to innocent children must come to an end. This legislation makes such abusive actions criminal.

Vernadette Broyles, president and general counsel of the Child and Parental Rights Campaign (CPRC), told Breitbart News in an interview the bill was partly modeled after one that came close to passing in South Dakota.

Broyles’ nonprofit, public interest law firm, one she founded to defend the rights of parents to protect their children from the harms of gender ideology, was involved in the drafting of the bill.

“Tremendous amounts of research went into this bill,” she said. “Medical, scientific research, and it was vetted by a variety of doctors and specialists.”

Broyles said the legislation would include criminal penalties for medical professionals providing transgender drugs or surgeries to minor children, as well as the possibility of review by professional boards and for civil liability.

However, the attorney added CPRC’s concern “is not the speed with which this bill precedes.”

“It is more important to lay the important groundwork and to educate both legislators and Georgians about these harmful interventions that have been happening in the dark and about which most Georgians are not aware,” she explained.

Broyles said her organization has been responding to what, in some cases, is “the wholesale trampling on parental rights.”

As Breitbart News reported in October 2018, Broyles, working with the Georgia Adoption and Family Law Practice, co-filed a complaint with the U.S. Education Department, one that focused on the sexual assault of a kindergarten girl in a Decatur school district that allowed transgender students to use the bathrooms of their choice.

In that case, which is still working its way through the education department’s Office for Civil Rights, the mother of a five-year-old girl alleged that her daughter was sexually assaulted by a “gender-fluid” boy in the girls’ bathroom in November 2017.

Broyles said:

So, we began to look more closely into what’s going on in schools, and that it wasn’t just the private facilities use, that it was now in other aspects of the school, where various school systems were allowing [transgender] activists into the school, or they were allowing their teachers or their administrators to be trained by activists, such that they were bringing in either curriculum or just a mindset similar to evangelism.

“I use that term very deliberately because this thing has some similar aspects to a religious belief and a cult,” the attorney added. “It’s not grounded in science, it’s grounded in a very subjective, personal metaphysical belief.”

Broyles said many parents are now seeing teachers or administrators “proselytizing” this transgender belief system in their children’s schools. She said:

It’s coming through a variety of different avenues into the school system, but they’re using it to indoctrinate a whole different world view of the very nature of homo sapiens. That’s one of the reasons why transgender ideology is so harmful, is that it is indoctrinating children in a worldview that says there are no boundaries.

Broyles explained that her law firm comes to this issue from both a child development and children’s basic civil rights perspective, rather than a political or faith viewpoint.

“Children have a central right, that should be protected, to be taught the truth about science and biology,” she asserted, adding:

They have a very basic right to view their body not as their enemy, and their biological sex not as a disease. A child has the right to know that his or her biological sex is not a disease and that puberty is not a disorder.

Broyles said the other danger gender ideology has created in many schools is the perspective that parents are an enemy to their children, rather than their primary advocates.

She discussed situations in which some school districts are actually instructing teachers not to inform parents of a minor child’s change in “gender identity” at school.

In Madison, Wisconsin, for example, the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty recently filed a lawsuit, on behalf of a group of parents, against the Madison Metropolitan School District, claiming the district violated parental rights by implementing a policy that allows children to change their gender identity without parental notice or consent.

“What we’re encountering is schools having a presumption that not only are parents a potential danger to their children, or parents do not have the children’s best interests at heart, but also that it is the schools that know better,” Broyles said.

“That’s putting the keys to the car in the child’s hands,” she said. “And also, automatically, the presumption is that parents are a potential threat and danger to their children.”