A Florida lawmaker who's pushing for some employers to foot the bill for gender detransitions fired back at Joe Biden after the president criticized Florida's policies about children with gender dysphoria.
Last year, Florida implemented measures banning puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries for children with gender dysphoria and classroom instruction on gender identity for grades kindergarten through third. Biden called the policies "cruel" and "close to sinful" during a Monday interview on "The Daily Show."
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"It amazes me that he is advocating for children that cannot go into an R-rated movie without an adult to make forever, life-altering decisions that they may never be able to reverse," Florida state Sen. Blaise Ingoglia told Fox News. "Florida is looking out for children, while Joe Biden is looking out for the radicals."
During the interview, Biden said Congress must act to undo Florida's policies.
"And the way we do it is we make sure we pass legislation like we passed on same-sex marriage," he told "The Daily Show" guest host Kal Penn, a former Barack Obama aide. "You mess with that, you’re breaking the law, and you’re going to be held accountable."
"It's not like a kid wakes up one morning and says ,'You know, I want to become a man' or ‘I want to become a woman,’ What are they thinking about here? They're human beings, they love, they have feelings, they have inclinations," Biden said.
Ingoglia accused Biden of bowing to pressure.
"What’s sinful is the way President Biden is succumbing to the woke mob and the leftists of his own party," he said in a statement to Fox News.
Ingoglia last month introduced the "Reverse Woke Act," which requires companies that paid for an employee's gender transition to also fund their detransition, if requested, even if they left the company or received the initial treatment in another state.
"If you're going to pay for the transition, at any point in the future, should people have regret and want to detransition, you actually have to pay for that also, whether they are an employee at the time or not," he said.
At the time of introducing the bill, Ingoglia said that nearly 30 companies promised to pay for their employees to travel out of Florida for gender transitions. He added that the law will cover any workers in Florida, even if their employers are based elsewhere.
"Disney is based in California, but they have a bunch of employees here in the state of Florida," he said "Disney had said that they were one of the companies that would help facilitate going to California to get some of these gender-affirming surgeries. So since you're an employee of Florida, they would be incorporated under this bill."
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He said Starbucks and Target also made similar promises.
The bill has not yet received a vote.
Following Biden’s comments, the Florida Agency for Health Care called the Biden administration’s "gender-affirming" model "decades behind other developed countries."
"What is ‘sinful’ is the establishment pushing harmful surgeries and treatment with long-term effects on minors with no accountability or transparency," Florida Agency for Health Care Administration Secretary Jason Weida told Fox News in a statement.
"Last year, the Agency conducted a thorough review of several services promoted by the Federal Government to treat gender dysphoria and found that these services – sex reassignment surgery, cross-sex hormones, and puberty blockers – are not consistent with widely accepted professional medical standards and are experimental and investigational with the potential for harmful long term effects," he added.
Click here to watch Fox News Digital Originals' full interview with Ingoglia.
