Yet more anti-trans legislation has been proposed in Ohio. This bill, called the Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act, imposes undue and discriminatory restrictions upon the care that licensed medical practitioners are able to provide to transgender children. This would restrict access to puberty blocking medications that have been clinically proven to be safe. Furthermore, this bill enacts restrictions on gender affirming surgical procedures that are redundant and unnecessary.
This bill alleges that doctors are performing procedures on minors such as metoidioplasty, phalloplasty, and vaginoplasty, which is simply not true. These procedures, which only a minority of less than 10% of transgender people (who only represent 5% of the US population as of 2022) choose to undergo, are already only clinically indicated when the patient is 18 years of age or older.
Minor children can legally receive breast reductions, tattoos, and piercings with parental consent in the state of Ohio, all of which are permanent alterations to the body that can also have social implications. If the Ohio House of Representatives is going to pass legislation that restricts the amount of control minors have over the expressions of their own bodies, it is blatant discrimination to target that legislation at transgender youth while making no effort to restrict the permanent alterations that cisgender minors are able to make to their bodies at will.
Ohio H.B. 68 is yet another example of legislators presuming to know better than licensed medical providers what is best for the health of Ohioans. It goes against all medical consensus on how transgender youth should be treated, and assumes much about the treatment of transgender children that is simply not factual. HB 68 places unnecessary and unduly burdensome restrictions on treatments available to children and legitimizes alarmist falsehoods about what it means to be trans by attempting to pass bills that codify lies about us into law, seek to erase us from public existence, and seek to deny us access to basic healthcare against the advice and wishes of patients and licensed doctors both.
These bills are transparent efforts to make life as inhospitable as possible for trans people. If you want to make transgender children as unsafe as possible, this is exactly how you do it. Please consider writing to your legislators to oppose H.B. 68.
Sam Jones
Athens, Ohio
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