Ohio’s state senate voted on Wednesday to override Governor Mike DeWine’s veto of a bill that bans transgender minors from receiving gender-affirming care and blocks their participation in team sports.
The bill, HB68, prohibits doctors from providing gender-affirming care – such as puberty blockers, hormone therapy or surgeries – to trans youths. It also blocks transgender female student athletes from participating on girls’ sports teams.
Notably, the bill includes a grandfather clause allowing trans people already receiving care to continue doing so.
In a departure from his party, DeWine vetoed the bill in December 2023, stating in a press conference at the time that it was up to parents to make medical decisions for the children – not the government.
“Parents are making decisions about the most precious thing in their life, their child, and none of us should underestimate the gravity and the difficulty of those decisions,” DeWine said at the time. “Many parents have told me that their child would be dead today if they had not received the treatment they received from an Ohio children’s hospital.”
A week later, DeWine proposed other rules to regulate gender-affirming care – which some advocates previously said “are, in some ways, worse than the proposed statute”. Those administrative rules would “go well beyond” the scope of HB68.
“I believe we can address a number of goals in House Bill 68 by administrative rules that will have a better chance of surviving judicial review and being adopted,” the governor said in December 2023 while announcing his veto.
“I share the legislature’s concerns about clinics that may pop up and try to sell patients inadequate or even ideological treatments.”
DeWine continued: “None of [the families] that I talked to talked about surgery. That’s not where they were going in the discussion. And I think that’s, frankly, a fallacy that’s out there that, you know, this goes right to surgery. It just doesn’t. All the children’s hospitals say that we don’t do surgeries.”
Earlier this month, the Republican-controlled state legislature revived the bill and the state senate voted in its favor 23-9, overriding the governor’s decision and pushing the bill through.
When the bill becomes law in 90 days, Ohio will join at least 22 other states that are either restricting or outright banning gender-affirming care, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
A federal judge ruled that an Arkansas law banning gender-affirming care for minors violated the US constitution. Similar laws have been blocked in Georgia, Indiana, Idaho, Texas and Montana, but other states like Ohio are unaffected by these rulings.
As a result, healthcare providers who violate these laws could face disciplinary action from their licensing boards.
Gender-affirming care is not offered to young patients without the consent of a parent or guardian in Ohio hospitals. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the American Medical Association (AMA) also formally opposed governmental intrusion into the practice of medicine.
The AMA underscored that gender-affirming care is “medically necessary, evidence-based care that improves the physical and mental health of transgender and gender-diverse people”.
