To Err Is DeWine

National Review Online

Monday, January 01, 2024

 

On Friday, Ohio governor Mike DeWine vetoed House Bill 68, the “SAFE Act,” which banned the regimen of puberty-blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones, and so-called “gender affirming” surgeries on minors, and the participation of athletes in school sports based on their asserted gender identity rather than their actual sex. In a press conference, DeWine said he would pursue regulations on surgeries only and somehow address ideologically driven clinics.

 

DeWine’s veto was wrong, and we hope the legislature swiftly overturns it.

 

“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 said. “These are gut-wrenching decisions that should be made by parents and should be informed by teams of doctors who are advising them.”

 

DeWine’s sudden-onset radical libertarianism is not credible. DeWine just recently vetoed a bill that restricted localities from regulating flavored tobacco products. He thinks grown men can’t have menthol cigarettes, but children can get their genitals reconfigured into non-working facsimiles? Give us a break.

 

Behind the rhetoric of family values and parental rights is a far more unsettling project. The SAFE Act does not curtail parental rights but prevents clinicians from committing reckless malpractice on minors. Moreover, the gender clinicians and activists who celebrated his veto do not believe in voluntary parental consent. They believe the law should be used to dispossess “non-affirming” parents of their children, that affirmation of gender ideology should become a requirement for adoption, and that any sign of rejection of gender ideology should be considered a red flag indicating potential child abuse. Parental rights such as these were explicitly protected in the SAFE Act.

 

Finally and most obviously, it is totally legitimate for governments to regulate behavior involving children, whether it be their access to alcohol, tattoos, or medical care. The argument advanced by Bill 68’s proponents, and conspicuously avoided by DeWine, is that these surgeries and drug treatments are abusive and against the best counsel of medical science, even if the current medical establishment has been hijacked by activists. Jurisdictions in Europe that have already traveled down this road have come running back to reel in these abuses.

 

Most gallingly, DeWine declared that his veto was about “protecting human life.” Saying so is an insult to pro-lifers, and it endorses and legitimates the trans movement’s appalling and cynical deployment of threatened suicide to get what it wants. Also, it’s a lie.

 

Ultimately, what Mike DeWine has missed, amid all the supposed testimony he referenced in his decision, is the truth: Given that the drugs and medical procedures at issue cause irreversible physical changes to children, it is those who support allowing them who should be required to meet a heavy evidentiary burden that they are necessary. Yet once the ideological thumbs are off the scientific scales, studies do not show evidence that experimental hormone therapies and surgeries help lower rates of depression and suicide among people who identify as transgender. In fact, a long-term Swedish study concluded that “persons with transsexualism, after sex reassignment, have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behaviour, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population.” Furthermore, those who try to reverse their transitions later in life have reported grueling side effects and lasting damage such as painful urination, incontinence, infections, sterility, and loss of sexual function. Phalloplasty — a surgical procedure to make a pseudo-penis out of flesh grafted from the patient’s arm or thigh — has complication rates of up to 75 percent.

 

There is no credible evidence that humans — or any mammals — are “born into the wrong sex” or that such a condition could be ameliorated by a lifetime of hormone therapies that render patients infertile, or surgeries that usually render them permanently incontinent as well. Enough is enough.