Ohio House Republicans voted on Wednesday to override Gov. Mike DeWine’s (R) veto of a bill that would protect minors from sex change drugs and procedures and ban male participation on female sports teams.
The Ohio House, which has a Republican supermajority, voted 65-28 to override DeWine’s veto of House Bill 68 or “Enact Ohio Saving Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act,” in an effort they said will protect children and families and female sports teams from the consequences of the radical left’s embrace of gender ideology.
“Consultation with an ideologically captured physician does not grant parents the right to harm children through irreversible surgeries and harmful drugs,” Republican State Rep. Gary Click, the bill’s sponsor, said in remarks before the vote.
He said:
No parent has the constitutional right to harm their child. The same government that requires you to send your children to school, prohibits you from giving them illicit drugs, and can charge parents with neglect and abuse, also has the obligation to prevent parents and physicians from chemically castrating and sterilizing their children.
The bill will head back to the Senate. If both chambers vote to override the DeWine’s veto, HB68 will go into effect 90 days after the final vote. The Ohio Senate is in session on Jan. 24.
Lawmakers in the House and Senate had overwhelmingly passed HB 68 before DeWine vetoed the bill on Dec. 29, breaking from his own party. In doing so, DeWine showed that he accepted the left’s hysterical claims that opposition to transgenderism causes children who identify as transgender to commit suicide. The governor said he made his veto decision after speaking to medical providers and added, “I’ve also listened to youth and parents. Parents who have told me if not for this treatment, their child would be dead.”
“The consequences of this bill could not be more profound. Ohio would be saying the state, the government, knows better than the two people who love that child the most, the parents,” DeWine said at the time.
After DeWine vetoed the bill, he issued an executive order banning sex-change surgeries for minors while still enabling parents to procure puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for their children. He also announced several proposed rules on the subject, including targeting “fly-by-night” providers, or clinics that are doling out sex-change drugs without quality care.
The draft rules would mandate that a multi-disciplinary team, including but not limited to an endocrinologist, a bioethicist, and a psychiatrist, oversee an individual through the sex-change process, he announced at a press conference last Friday. The rules would also require a “comprehensive care plan” that includes “sufficient informed consent from patients and parents if we are dealing with a child” about the risks associated with sex-change drugs and procedures, which can include a loss of fertility. The rules would require comprehensive and lengthy mental health counseling before moving forward with a sex change.
“With all due respect, the governor is attempting to take legislative power away from this body with his veto,” Republican State Rep. Josh Williams said before the vote.”The governor had only been studying HB68 for ten days when he decided to veto the legislation. Representative Click has been working with interested parties for more than two years and has a more complete understanding of the complex issues surrounding transitioning of minors.”
“You are literally trying to sterilize children in the name of an agenda,” Williams continued. “[HB68] will help protect children, and sometimes we must protect them — even from themselves. This will stop the practice of transitioning children prematurely and get them the mental health support that they need as they go through these difficult situations.”
Williams added that there are “substantial portions of this bill that the governor didn’t even consider.”
“Men moving into women’s sports [and] the integrity of fair play and competition,” he said. “Title IX was created to create equality in athletics and education and has been thrown out to accommodate a few men attempting to take opportunities away from women.”
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DeWine’s veto and subsequent executive order and draft rules appeared to be a play at appeasing both sides of the transgenderism debate by outlawing extreme sex-mutilating procedures for minors while still allowing the beginning of social and chemical sex transitions in the name of parental rights. DeWine appears to be part of a subset of Republicans who claim parents have the right to subject their children to so-called “gender-affirming care.” For example, two Republican presidential candidates, Nikki Haley and Chris Christie, have claimed that outlawing sex-mutilating drugs and procedures would disempower parents from making decisions about their children.
That sentiment was reflected in comments from Ohio Democrats before the vote, as well as a recent ruling out of Idaho regarding the state’s ban on sex-change drugs and surgeries for minors, in which the judge claimed in his order that “parents should have the right to make the most fundamental decisions about how to care for their children.”
Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on X @thekat_hamilton.