Ohio House votes to override veto of bill banning children’s transgender surgeries  

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jan 10, 2024 / 17:47 pm (CNA).

The Ohio House of Representatives voted to override Republican Gov. Mike DeWine’s veto on a bill banning children’s transgender surgeries.

The House voted to overturn DeWine’s veto in a strictly party-line, 65-28 vote. Next, the bill will be sent to the Ohio Senate, which plans to vote on it on Jan. 24. Republicans also hold a 26-7 supermajority over Democrats in the Ohio Senate.

The bill titled the Saving Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act would ban gender reassignment surgeries and hormonal treatments on children as well as enact the Save Women’s Sports Act, keeping individuals born as males from competing in women’s sports.

The bill states that “it is of grave concern to the General Assembly that the medical community is allowing individuals who experience distress at identifying with their biological sex to be subjects of irreversible and drastic non-genital gender reassignment surgery and irreversible, permanently sterilizing genital gender reassignment surgery, despite the lack of studies showing that the benefits of such extreme interventions outweigh the risks.”

DeWine vetoed the SAFE Act on Dec. 29, saying: “Ultimately, I believe this is about protecting human life. Many parents have told me that their child would be dead today if they had not received the treatment they received from an Ohio children’s hospital.”

“Were I to sign [the SAFE Act],” DeWine said, “Ohio would be saying that the state, that the government, knows what is best medically for a child rather than the two people who love that child the most, the parents.”

After vetoing the bill, DeWine announced an executive order that banned transgender surgeries on children but did not stop hormonal gender reassignment treatments or keep men from playing in women’s sports.

The Ohio House’s vote to override the governor’s veto was celebrated by many conservative groups and leaders.

Ohio State Rep. Gary Click, a Republican who introduced the SAFE Act, said that the vote “marks yet another victory for women and children in Ohio.”

“It is hard to fathom that we live in a society that would tell children that they need drugs and scalpels to live their authentic lives or that treats women as second-class citizens in their own spaces,” he said. “With this vote, we are restoring the fundamental value that the rights of women ought to be protected in women’s spaces and children are once again entitled to grow up intact.”