Conservative advocacy groups are condemning Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine’s executive order to ban sex-change surgeries for minors as insufficient as an effort to override his veto of a bill that would have prohibited all forms of body disfiguring drugs and procedures on youth continues.
In an executive order signed Friday, DeWine, a Republican, banned sex-change surgeries for minors. The executive order comes a week after DeWine vetoed House Bill 68, which would have banned trans-identified minors from obtaining body mutilating surgeries, puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.
House Bill 68 also prohibited trans-identified male athletes from competing in girls’ sports. DeWine implicitly expressed support for allowing minors to obtain puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones in his veto message, saying, “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.”
In Executive Order 2024-01D, DeWine stated that he “agreed with the General Assembly that no gender transition surgeries should be performed on anyone under the age of 18.” He noted that the Ohio Department of Health has drafted rules to ban this practice and explained that Ohio law allows the governor to “suspend the normal rule making procedures with respect to specific rules when an emergency exists necessitating the immediate adoption, amendment or rescission of such rules.”
While DeWine determined that an “emergency exists” justifying the expedited implementation of rules banning sex-change surgeries for minors, these rules are only in effect for 120 days per Ohio law. In the meantime, Ohio joins 22 other states that prohibit some or all forms of trans procedures for minors.
The nonprofit legal organization Alliance Defending Freedom released a statement Friday characterizing DeWine’s executive order as inadequate.
“Gov. DeWine’s ‘emergency’ executive order blatantly fails to protect Ohio’s children,” said ADF Senior Counsel Matt Sharp. “Let’s be crystal clear: growing evidence shows that the long-term use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones hurts a child’s physical, emotional, and psychological development in ways that we still don’t understand.”
“The governor’s move also fails to address the ongoing issues of males competing in women’s sports, depriving female athletes in Ohio of opportunities they have worked their whole lives to achieve,” he added. “We urge the Ohio Legislature to put the state’s children, women, and families first and swiftly override the governor’s misguided veto of H.B. 68.”
Matt Walsh, a Daily Wire commentator and radio host who has emerged as an outspoken critic of policies allowing minors to obtain such procedures, took to X Friday to deride DeWine’s effort as “an incoherent compromise position.” Lamenting that DeWine’s executive order still allows “chemical castration of children” and is “not nearly good enough,” Walsh declared, “his veto must be overridden, and he should still be run out of Republican politics forever.”
Jason Stephens, the speaker of the Republican-controlled Ohio House of Representatives, issued a statement following DeWine’s veto of House Bill 68, noting that it “passed by veto-proof majorities in each chamber.”
He added, “We will certainly discuss as a caucus and take the appropriate next steps.”
The Ohio House of Representatives is scheduled to meet again Wednesday.
The push to ban the experimental practice of performing trans procedures on minors comes amid concerns about their long-term impacts. The American College of Pediatricians lists potential side effects of puberty blockers as “osteoporosis, mood disorders, seizures, cognitive impairment and, when combined with cross-sex hormones, sterility” while identifying “an increased risk of heart attacks, stroke, diabetes, blood clots and cancers across their lifespan” as possible long-term impacts of cross-sex hormones.
Trans surgeries, which are prohibited by DeWine’s executive order, leave behind unsightly scars that remain for a lifetime after the removal of girls’ healthy breasts. Some girls choose to remove tissue from their forearm to create a fake, flaccid penis.
Prominent detransitioner Chloe Cole, who filed a lawsuit against the medical professionals who encouraged her to have a double mastectomy to look more masculine, attributed her suicidal ideation to that trauma.
As for the other aspect of Ohio’s House Bill 68 pertaining to women’s sports, 24 other states already have laws and/or regulations in place requiring trans-identified athletes to compete on sports teams that correspond to their biological sex.
Efforts to pass such measures stem from concerns that allowing males to compete in women’s sports puts women at a disadvantage because the biological differences between men and women give males a physiological advantage in sports.
USA Powerlifting, which has implemented a policy requiring athletes to compete on teams according to their biological sex, cites “increased body and muscle mass, bone density, bone structure, and connective tissue” as factors that give men an advantage over women in sports. A study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine in December 2020 revealed that trans-identified males maintain an advantage over females in athletics even after two years of hormone use.
Ryan Foley is a reporter for The Christian Post. He can be reached at: ryan.foley@christianpost.com
Free Religious Freedom Updates
Join thousands of others to get the FREEDOM POST newsletter for free, sent twice a week from The Christian Post.
