Ohio Gov. DeWine’s Veto Puts Kids, Women’s Sports at Risk

Ohio Republican Governor Mike DeWine on Friday vetoed legislation aimed at protecting women’s sports and prohibiting dangerous hormone therapy treatments and experimental “gender reassignment” surgery for minors.

In justifying his decision, DeWine resorted to repeating several common talking points advanced by supporters of child gender transitions, including the lie that allowing teenagers to undergo permanent and medically unnecessary life-altering surgeries “saves lives” and the irrational assertion that putting children as young as eight years old on hormone blockers is justified as long as parents sign off on it.

The legislation, Ohio House Bill 68, officially titled the Saving Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act, easily passed the Republican-supermajority state legislature just before Christmas.

HB 68 specifically “require[s] schools, state institutions of higher education, and private colleges to designate separate single-sex teams and sports for each sex” and states that doctors cannot “perform gender reassignment surgery on a minor individual” or “prescribe a cross-sex hormone or puberty-blocking drug for a minor individual for the purpose of assisting the minor individual with gender transition.”

The bill also explicitly prohibits Ohio courts from limiting a parent’s right to see his or her child based on that parent’s unwillingness to “affirm” the child’s self-professed transgender identity. In some states like California, legislators have proposed laws requiring courts to punish parents who oppose putting their children on hormone therapies or signing off on transgender surgery.

“Ultimately I believe this is about protecting human life,” DeWine said during a news conference on Friday. “Many parents have told me that their child would not have survived, would be dead today, if they had not received the treatment they received from one of Ohio’s children’s hospitals.”

Here, DeWine is engaging in an emotional blackmail tactic commonly deployed by advocates of minor transgender surgeries. As Jamie Reed, a former employee of the St. Louis Children’s Hospital transgender clinic, revealed in a gut-wrenching exposé for The Free Press earlier this year, confused and scared parents are often told by “medical experts” that if they don’t sign off on experimental treatments that often leave children horrifically disfigured or sterile for life, then their son or daughter might commit suicide. (In reality, data show that more than 80 percent of children who question their gender grow out of it by adulthood.)

DeWine also said that decisions about what surgeries and medical treatments children undergo “should be made by parents and should be informed by teams of doctors who are advising them.”

“Were I to sign House Bill 68, or were House Bill 68 to become law, Ohio would be saying that the state, that the government knows better what is medically best for a child than the two people who love that child the most: the parents,” DeWine continued.

Once again, DeWine is mimicking one of the left’s favorite strategies by weaponizing the logic of the parental rights movement against conservatives and the voices of common sense.

But the assertion DeWine makes is, of course, ridiculous. Along with the fact that parents are being intentionally deceived by transgender clinics that stand to make huge financial gains from “transitioning” as many children as possible, it is absurd to suggest that there should be no limits on what parents can do with their children.

For instance, no sane person would believe that it’s acceptable to allow a young child to drink heavily or smoke cigarettes just because his or her parents believe it won’t harm them. In the same vein, just because a parent believes that beating a child is helpful for his or her development doesn’t mean that the government shouldn’t intervene to protect that child from a clearly dangerous situation.

It’s no different when it comes to the drugs and operations that Republicans in the Ohio legislature are trying protect kids from. There are currently zero long-term studies about the safety of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormone treatments for minors, while more than half of all transgender surgeries, in both minors and adults, result in severe complications, many of which require additional surgeries. Perhaps most tragically of all, suicidality in transgender-identifying individuals actually increases after “transitioning.”

As Parker Thayer, a researcher for Capital Research Center, detailed on X, it’s worth noting that one of the primary opponents of HB 68 was the Ohio Children’s Hospital Association – which notably donated $20,000 to DeWine’s re-election effort last year. Ohio’s children’s hospitals are also receiving millions of dollars for experimental transgender surgeries and have a vested financial interest in keeping the surgeries and cross-sex hormones legal for kids.

DeWine has a history of making decisions that earn him the ire of Ohio conservatives. During the COVID-19 pandemic, DeWine enacted some of the most stringent lockdown policies in the country and kept schools, churches, and businesses closed far longer than states like Florida or South Dakota. He was also a frequent guest on liberal networks like CNN and MSNBC and lauded the performance of former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.

DeWine also irked conservatives in Ohio and around the country by failing to contribute to the effort earlier this year to defeat Issue 1, a ballot initiative which ultimately passed that effectively enshrines a right to abortion up until the moment of birth in the state’s constitution.

Through his handling of the pandemic and general hesitation to embrace core conservative issues, culminating now with his veto of HB 68, DeWine seems to be following in the footsteps of his predecessor John Kasich, another Republican who repeatedly opposed the party’s conservative base – most notably by becoming one of Donald Trump’s top critics in 2016.

Nonetheless, it should be remembered that Ohio Republicans had the chance to replace DeWine last year and failed to do so. Although two other Republicans ran strong campaigns challenging DeWine from the right in the GOP primary, the anti-DeWine contingent of the party failed to unite around one challenger and DeWine easily cruised to victory with 48 percent of the vote.

Republican leaders in the Ohio legislature have vowed to override DeWine’s veto on HB 68 and enact the bill anyway – although that goal is by no means a sure bet, even with a GOP supermajority.

Regardless, this entire episode is a reminder that even in states controlled by Republicans, the left has not given up the fight, and is still determined to enact their agenda by any means possible. Conservatives must continue to remain vigilant and hold Republican officials accountable when they act as pawns of the radical left.

Shane Harris is a writer and political consultant from Southwest Ohio. You can follow him on Twitter @ShaneHarris513.