OH-no!

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine recently vetoed an anti-trans care bill, declaring that it's up to parents to make medical decisions for their children. He was applauded by supporters of trans rights.

But a few days later he utterly betrayed those transgender people and their supporters by issuing Executive Orders containing proposed rules that cover much the same ground as the bill he vetoed and are in some ways worse. What follows is a blending of my response to a video on the matter and my more formal comment submitted to Ohio on the proposed rules.

PS: The veto was overridden. There was speculation that DeWine issued the Executive Orders hoping to head off an override; no word yet on if the override will lead to the rules being withdrawn or if he'll seek to combine the worst of both.

For more on what the rules say, check out the invaluable Erin Reed.

Anyway, this is what I said:

The proposed rules stand in stark contrast to the positions and standards of care expressed by, among others, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Endocrine Society, and WPATH (World Professional Association of Transgender Health) - that is, they ignore, indeed reject, the expert scientific and clinical judgments of those who are the leading experts in the field of gender-affirming care in favor of politically-driven posturing and fearmongering.

Rather then protecting anyone's health or safety, these regulations - which are in several ways worse than the bill the Governor vetoed - are a transgender version of TRAP (Targeted Restrictions on Abortion Providers) laws, a method used in anti-choice states to effectively ban abortions without admitting to it by putting more and more restrictions on clinics, often involving medically-unnecessary requirements, to the point where few or even no clinics in a state were capable of meeting them all. That is, don't ban abortions, just make them impossible to get.

The goal is the same here: presenting a facade of preserving access to gender-affirming care while in actuality creating a maze of roadblocks, bottlenecks, and pointless requirements with the effect of making obtaining that care all but impossible - that is, to accomplish by regulation what cannot accomplished by law or, more to the point, accomplish by trickery what can't be accomplished legitimately. I label Gov. Mike DeWine a conscious hypocrite, hoping to get away with talking out of both sides of his mouth, saying on one side "I vetoed the bill" and on the other "I made it effectively impossible to get the care," and using a smokescreen of "protecting youth" as a means to cover an attack all transgender people of all ages.

These proposed rules are, in sum, uninformed and misguided at best, unethical to the point of outright cruelty at worst.

Amend that: It gets worse. Multiple studies have found that obtaining gender-affirming care leads to improved mental health and significant reductions in suicide attempts and actual suicides. Which means that the result of regulations like these is that people will die. We can't say just who, just when, or precisely how many, but based on the data, on the facts, we can say with high assurance that People. Will. Die. Endorsing these rules is endorsing suicide.

I urge these proposed regulations be withdrawn in their entirety and any new such rules be drafted only in consultation with WPATH and other professional organizations dealing with the medical and mental health care issues involved.

Or at the very least have the sufficient honesty to drop the hypocrisy and admit your goal is the total erasure from society of transgender people.

This was not the first attempt this year to deny health care and human rights to members of the LGBTQ+ community. According to the LGBTQ+ Legislative Tracking 2024 site, as of January 14 there have been 219 bills introduced across 25 states and Congress related to community issues. Not every one of these is anti-LGBTQ+ in general or anti-transgender in particular, indeed some may be positive, and of those that are negative, many will not pass or will be combined into a package because they are essentially duplicates. And it’s worthy of note that most of the total are being introduced in states that already have laws denying LGBTQ+ rights; for example, Florida, already so hostile to trans folks that it’s listed as “Do Not Travel,” accounts for 21 of the bills. And some of them have been introduced in states such as Maryland and New Jersey where it can safely be said that their chances of passing are effectively nil.

So the numbers alone do not tell the story, but they do indicate that this onslaught against human rights is not abating. This remains no time to relax - because, remember even if only a small percentage of these bills pass, they still have real consequences for the people affected. But even so, while the infection is not abating, it at least may no longer be spreading.

But that begs the question of what is driving the continued attacks, particularly considering many of these bills amount to little more than piling on. So what combination of ignorance, paranoia, (usually religious) fanaticism, and cold, exploitive, cynical, political ambition is driving it?

That’s a valid question, but it’s one for another time. Hopefully a soon-type time.