WARNING: This article contains graphic content.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, fired back Tuesday at President Joe Biden after the president defended transgender surgeries and procedures for children.
“It is not ‘sinful’ to prohibit the mutilation of minors,” DeSantis said in a Tuesday morning tweet. “It is not acceptable for the federal government to mandate that procedures like sex change operations be allowed for kids.”
The Florida governor was responding to Biden’s remarks on the Florida medical board banning transgender surgeries, hormones, and puberty blockers for children. Biden, speaking to former Obama aide Kal Penn on The Daily Show, suggested that the state’s efforts to protect children are “cruel.”
“What’s going on in Florida is, as my mother would say, close to sinful. I mean, it’s just terrible what they’re doing,” Biden said.
He added: “It’s not like a kid [just] 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.”
Team DeSantis also responded to the president’s remarks in a video that shows gruesome photos of the effects of transgender surgeries, including mastectomies and skin grafts, side by side with Biden’s remarks.
“Biden thinks it’s ‘cruel’ that Florida is NOT allowing experimental sex change operations for kids,” the DeSantis War Room tweeted.
The governor’s press secretary called it “incredulous” that “the President of the United States attempts to make a moral argument FOR surgically altering children in the name of radical gender ideology.”
“Thankfully, @GovRonDeSantis speaks truth in response,” Bryan Griffin said.
Biden’s comments came shortly after news that Pope Francis, the head of the Catholic Church, said gender ideology is “one of the most dangerous ideological colonizations” of the modern day.
“Why is it dangerous? Because it blurs differences and the value of men and women,” he added, according to the Catholic News Agency.
“All humanity is the tension of differences. It is to grow through the tension of differences. The question of gender is diluting the differences and making the world the same, all dull, all alike, and that is contrary to the human vocation.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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