Ohio has banned gender-affirming care for minors and restricted transgender women’s and girls’ participation on sports teams, a move that has families of transgender children scrambling over how best to care for them.
The Republican-dominated Senate voted Wednesday to override GOP Gov. Mike DeWine’s veto. The new law bans gender-affirming surgeries and hormone therapies, and restricts mental health care for transgender individuals under 18. The measure also bans transgender girls and women from girls and women’s sports teams at both the K-12 and collegiate level.
the number of gender affirming surgeries on minors actually occuring each year is very small. looks like about 800 between 2019 and 2021. if a percentage of those cases could have been potential suicide deaths, then its likely worth the small risk of them regretting it later, especially since studies of gender affirming surgery show very low regret rates.
Laws like this one (as well as far right fear mongering in general) misrepresent that situation even more than you’d think. Only 800 minors in the country (out of ~80 million depending on how you count, so ~0.001% of all US minors) got any transition related surgeries over the course of 2 years. On top of that, there aren’t a lot of surgeons who do these surgeries, and some of them won’t operate on minors. So because of the limited number of surgeons, trans people often have to travel across at least state lines to get these surgeries, which is why none of this very small population of minors even got their surgeries in Ohio.
These laws are made all the more sinister when you realize half of their content outlaws things that aren’t even happening entirely for the sake of feeding into bigoted fear mongering and dehumanization - “they’re coming for your kids.”