Here’s a recent Washington Times story on protests over a South Dakota proposal to ban potentially irreversible transgender procedures on children.

The first state to wrestle with the issue is South Dakota, where the House State Affairs Committee passed a proposal by a vote of 8-5 last week that would make it a criminal offense for doctors to treat children younger than 16 with hormones or gender-reassignment surgery.

South Dakota state Rep. Fred Deutsch, a Republican and the bill’s sponsor, testified that HB 1057 was needed as a “pause button” to stop life-altering, potentially irreversible medical treatments based not on blood tests or brain scans, but on “a child’s self-assertion.”

The increased cancer risks are potentially fatal.

The bill is expected to advance to the House floor this week for a vote in the Republican-controlled chamber over the protests of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has vowed to challenge the legislation in court if it becomes law.

“If you want to criminalize this — the only state in the nation that would criminalize the doctor-patient relationship — you are also criminalizing that parent who is in charge of that minor,” said Dean Krogman, chief lobbyist for the South Dakota State Medical Association. “They are complicit because they are the ones who are allowing this to happen, not a 12-year-old child.”

Really? The only state? Here’s an opposite version of this bill in California. This one is backed by the ACLU.

California lawmakers have rejected what would have been a first-of-its-kind ban on medically unnecessary treatment for infants born with ambiguous or conflicting genitalia.

But a majority of state lawmakers on a key legislative committee thought the bill’s definition of “intersex” was too broad, especially after hearing testimony from a pediatric urologist who said it would limit doctors’ ability to treat patients with complex medical issues.

And here’s the ACLU backing this.

A core aspect of human autonomy and dignity is to be able to make decisions about our own bodies. But each year, doctors around the country continue to perform medically unnecessary, harmful surgeries on intersex infants and children, just to “normalize” their bodies. What this means is that doctors are forcing infants and young children to undergo medically unnecessary genital surgery simply to force their natural bodies to conform to traditional societal—and binary—views of “male” and “female” bodes.

So the ACLU’s position is that it’s a good idea to ban corrective surgery for infants, but a terrible idea to ban gender transition surgeries. The guiding principle is that ‘intersex’ is a legitimate identity, while male and female ‘binary’ identities aren’t.

This is how identity politics makes a mockery of any notion of civil rights.

The ACLU will fight to protect transgender procedures on children, who are unable to meaningfully consent, while fighting against corrective procedures on infants, not because it has any consistent definition of human rights, but because its idea of human rights is whatever promotes identity politics, even when it causes harm to children.