The government has decided to ban hormone treatment and gender-affirming surgery for minors, presidential spokesman Manuel Adorni announced on Wednesday. The authorities will also prevent prisoners from being transferred if they transition after committing the crime.

The administration would need to modify the 2012 Gender Identity Law to implement these changes, Adorni said. However, trans rights advocates and lawyers say these changes would need to be approved by Congress.

The announcement comes two weeks after President Javier Milei’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he linked “gender ideology” — an anti-trans term — to pedophilia and delivered a diatribe against what he called the “LGBT agenda.”

A statement from the presidential communications team described its measures as “frontal combat against gender extremism.”

Adorni said that minors can receive “treatments and surgery to change their body” based on their identity, with the consent of their parents — and if their parents refuse, they can seek authorization from a judge. This would no longer be allowed under the new plans.

“These interventions to which children are exposed are a serious risk to their health, both physical and mental, since it implies an interruption to their maturation process,” Adorni said.

In practice, gender-affirming treatment for trans teens under the age of 16 is limited to temporary and reversible care, such as puberty blockers.

Sexual health nonprofit Fundación Huésped notes that gender-affirming hormone therapy is typically recommended from the age of 16.

Julia Amore, an advisor in the Deputy Chamber’s Women and Diversity Commission, told the Herald that there are virtually no cases of minors seeking gender-confirmation surgery. Should they want to, they would need the authorization and consent of their parents or legal guardians: if unobtainable, they would have to bring their case to court.

“It is a concrete and stigmatizing attack, of criminalization, with a clear intention to stain this sector of the population,” she added.

According to the presidential statement, prison inmates will be housed according to the sex registered on their identity card when the crime for which they are imprisoned is committed. 

For sexual offenses, trans inmates will not be allowed to request a transfer even if they had requested a change in gender on their document before committing the crime. These changes will be passed by decree, the statement said.

“This means that if a convict is in a men’s prison, he will no longer [be able to] ask to be transferred to a women’s ward just because he perceives himself to be a woman,” Adorni said. He referred to a case in Córdoba in which a prisoner was transferred to a women’s prison after transitioning and then assaulted women inmates, saying: “They can commit further aberrant crimes against victims who are also women.”

For a government to change legislation such as the Gender Identity Law, it must pass another law modifying the first — but the second law cannot be “regressive,” according to constitutional lawyer Andrés Gil Domínguez.

“When dealing with human rights, fundamental rights and the principle of progressivity, not regressivity, applies,” he said. Even if such modifications were to make it through Congress, they could then be challenged in court, he added.

Amy Booth, Facundo Iglesia, Valen Iricibar, and Estefanía Pozzo contributed reporting