DeWine bans gender-affirming surgeries on minors

“I think it’s a good way to take this issue off the table and assure everyone that there are not surgeries going on with minors,” DeWine said in a Friday press conference. “You can’t prove a negative. I can’t say that there’s never been a surgery on a minor ... but if there are, we should ban them.”

DeWine, who came under intense nationwide scrutiny from Republican officials and voters after expressing his belief that gender-affirming hormone treatments can be lifesaving for transgender minors, said he hopes the executive ban will create a sense of comfort for those with concerns. He noted that he found a broad consensus opposed to gender affirming surgeries on minors in the two weeks he spent finding facts in the lead up to his veto.

The governor reiterated his view that “parents, not the government, should be making these very crucial medical decisions for their children,” and said his resolve has stood firm.

DeWine, who has maintained a consistent opposition to gender-affirming surgeries on minors, said he believes his executive order is more likely to hold up under judicial review.

The move is unlikely to move the needle for Statehouse Republicans, many of whom, including leadership in both the House and the Senate, have already expressed their disappointment with the governor. Some, like local Rep. Sara Carruthers, R-Hamilton, felt the governor’s actions were too little and too late.

“He should have thought this through way before it passed out of Senate committee. I think everyone was willing to talk and work on it then. Now it’s far too late,” Carruthers told this news organization.

Candidate for U.S. House Ohio District 2 and state Sen. Niraj Antani, R-Miamisburg, said Friday’s events did little to sway him.

“I think it was completely wrong, gigantically wrong, to veto the bill and we will correct it by overriding the governor’s veto and making this law, as it should be, to protect the children and women of Ohio,” Antani said.

DeWine said his decisions were not made with the intent of changing the course of the legislature. “I don’t know what it will do, but I’m doing it because it’s important that we do it,” he said.

Also on Friday, the governor ordered relevant agencies to instate formal protections for all people undergoing gender affirming medical care in the state. The rules, he said, will ensure that patients undergo extensive counseling before any medical care and be be overseen by multidisciplinary teams throughout. The rules also aim to create surety surrounding a patient’s ability to understand the risks of treatment and provide informed consent.

His administration also made moves to compel medical providers to report data on gender affirming medical treatments in order to begin to fill a gap in data. DeWine said the data will give elected officials, policymakers and the public a better ability to make informed decisions.

“We need to have data. We need to have information we have 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,” Dewine said, “So you know, it’s time that we got that information.”