Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, has vetoed a bill that would ban gender transition procedures for minors and prohibit male athletes from playing on female sports teams.
Specifically, the bill—known as the SAFE (Saving Ohio Adolescents from Experimentation) Act—would ban physicians from performing gender reassignment surgeries or prescribing cross-sex hormones or puberty-blocking drugs to minors.
Other provisions would prohibit courts from denying or limiting parents’ rights based on their decision to raise their child according to his or her biological sex and bar schools from allowing male athletes to join female sports teams in high schools and colleges.
Announcing his decision at a Dec. 29 press conference, the governor said that after meeting with families, visiting children’s hospitals, and weighing arguments both for and against the legislation, he could not sign the bill.
“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,” Mr. DeWine said, noting that he’d vetoed the bill moments before the press conference.
He stressed that he had spoken with several transgender individuals who said they would have taken their own lives if they had not received gender-altering treatments.
Sports Are Another Issue
Meanwhile, the sports issue, he said, did not factor into his decision.“The second sports part of this bill [is] certainly important, but it affects just a handful, literally a handful of children,” he said. “The part that I’ve addressed affects many more, even though it’s a small number of the total population of children in the state of Ohio, so I focused on that and did not ever get to the second issue.”
Despite the veto, the governor said he shared Republican lawmakers’ concerns about several issues the bill addressed, including the performance of gender-altering surgeries on children.
“I adamantly agree with the General Assembly that no surgery of this kind should ever be performed on those under the age of 18,” he said. “I am therefore directing our agencies to draft rules to ban this practice in the state of Ohio.”
He said he would also direct state agencies to immediately draft new rules requiring them to report data on patients who had received gender-altering care to the General Assembly every six months, as well as rules restricting who could provide such care.
“I invited members of the General Assembly to meet with us to collaborate, to collaborate in the rule drafting and to move this process forward, and I asked them to work with us starting next week,” he added.
The bill passed the Ohio House and Senate earlier this month with near unanimous support from Republicans, with the exception of state Sen. Nathan Manning.
The party holds a supermajority in both legislative chambers and would have the votes necessary to override Mr. DeWine’s veto if they so choose.
