REPORTER: Your office told us that you plan to appeal the gender-affirming ruling from yesterday. So my question today, since we're talking about the budget of taxpayer dollars, why should taxpayer dollars go to this case for the appeal?

DESANTIS: Because it's wrong to mutilate minors. It is wrong to perform a sex change on a 16-year-old. You're not allowed to get a tattoo, but somehow, you can have your privates cut off? Give me a break. //

It's ridiculous. Of course, a state can protect children. //

DESANTIS: This idea of using tax dollars because the media will point out, "Oh, the state is spending money to do." So if you say that we shouldn't do that, you're saying that any liberal judge should be able to veto the policy of the State of Florida because they go to the same judges every time, we lost almost every time, and we win on appeal almost every time.

That's what happens so if you're not willing to defend Florida's duly-enacted statutes against liberal jurisprudence, then you're basically saying the people of Florida shouldn't govern themselves and that we should just turn over our destiny to some trial judge somewhere. That I refuse to do.

DESANTIS: What this is doing, when they're doing a sex change on a teenager, there's a lot of people that want to make money off that, consequences be damned, their lining their pockets and they could care less about what's going to happen to that teenager when they become 25, which many regret and have big-time problems as a result of that.

But it's also just a fact of, you used the term "gender-affirming-care," which is what media uses and what the left uses. You're not affirming that. You're trying to change their basic biology, which you can not do. You can not do that. How you're born is what you are. And so I think it's about, are we going to be rooted in truth as a society or not? And if we're rooted in truth, then you would say, of course, you can't do these surgeries because it's not going to take and transform somebody that's a male into a female.