Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine announced on Friday that he is banning sex-change surgeries for minors while still enabling parents to procure puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for their children.
The move appears to be a play at appeasing both sides of the transgenderism debate by outlawing extreme sex-mutilating procedures for minors while still allowing the beginning of social and chemical sex transitions in the name of parental rights. The governor announced his executive order, as well as several proposed rules on the subject, during a press conference days after vetoing a GOP-led bill that would have protected children from both sex-change procedures and hormones and women and girls’ sports teams.
“A week ago today, I vetoed House Bill 68. A week has gone by, and I still feel just as firmly about that as I did that day,” DeWine said on Friday. “I believe that parents, not the government, should be making these very crucial medical decisions for their children.”
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Besides outlawing procedures that butcher the bodies of sex-confused minors, DeWine has submitted rules for public comment along with the Ohio Department of Health and the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction that he said would target “fly-by-night” providers, or clinics that are dolling out sex-change drugs without quality care. Indeed, there have been reports across the country of some clinics prescribing sex-change drugs after as little as half an hour.
“Candidly, I am concerned that there could be fly-by-night providers, clinics, that might be dispensing medication to adults with no counseling and no basic standards to assure quality care,” he said.
The draft rules would mandate that a multi-disciplinary team, including but not limited to an endocrinologist, a bioethicist, and a psychiatrist, oversee an individual through the sex-change process.
The rules would also require a “comprehensive care plan” that includes “sufficient informed consent from patients and parents if we are dealing with a child” about the risks associated with sex-change drugs and procedures, which can include a loss of fertility. The rules would require comprehensive and lengthy mental health counseling before moving forward with a sex change.
“Let me just add that as I spent time looking at this and listening to people, it’s clear that the most important part is the mental health counseling. It needs to be lengthy, and it needs to be comprehensive. I want to emphasize that,” he said.
The rules would additionally require healthcare providers to report de-identified data on cases of gender dysphoria and subsequent prescriptions and procedures.
On December 29, DeWine broke with his own party in vetoing a bill that would protect children from dangerous and permanent transgender medical procedures and ban male-born transgender athletes from playing as females in girls’ and women’s sports.
DeWine showed that he accepted the left’s hysterical claims that opposition to transgenderism causes transgender kids to commit suicide. The governor said he made his veto decision after speaking to medical providers and added, at the time, “I’ve also listened to youth and parents. Parents who have told me if not for this treatment, their child would be dead.”
“The consequences of this bill could not be more profound. Ohio would be saying the state, the government, knows better than the two people who love that child the most, the parents,” he said at the time.
HB 68 was passed in the state House with a party-line 64-28 vote and in the Senate by 24-8. Only one Republican crossed the aisle to vote with the Democrats, GOP Sen. Nathan Manning. While the GOP-led legislature does have enough seats to override DeWine’s veto, it is unknown when or if this might occur, the Associated Press reported.
When reporters asked DeWine on Friday if he hoped his executive order and proposed rules would stave off a veto override, he made an effort to distance himself from the decision and painted his efforts as a separate but necessary step to protect minors, while also protecting parents’ ability to make health care decisions for their children:
When I really started looking at this, these were some holes that are clear to me, needed to be filled. One, we need to have data. We need to have information. We have it on virtually everything else in the medical field. We don’t have data on this. We don’t have data about the frequency and circumstances. It’s time that we got that information. So, whatever the legislature does, we’re going through with this. This is something that’s important.
“If there is an override, it does not impact what we are doing,” he added later in the press conference.
DeWine appears to be part of a subset of Republicans who claim parents have the right to subject their children to so-called “gender-affirming care.” For example, two Republican presidential candidates, Nikki Haley and Chris Christie, have claimed that outlawing sex-mutilating drugs and procedures would disempower parents from making decisions about their children.
That sentiment was reflected in a recent ruling out of Idaho regarding the state’s ban on sex-change drugs and surgeries for minors, in which a judge claimed in his order that “parents should have the right to make the most fundamental decisions about how to care for their children.”
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