Blocking gender affirming care is a continuous attack on trans communities

(January 25, 2024) Cleveland, OH - Yesterday, the Ohio Senate voted 24-8 to override Governor Mark DeWine’s earlier veto of House Bill 68, a Bill sponsored by Republican Representative Gary Click. House Bill 68 will be implemented in roughly 90 days and is one of 21 states to have banned gender-affirming care in the United States. This Bill has key implications for young people 18 years and younger, women athletes, and their families, that we know will impact the livelihoods of our communities: parents right to decline consent for their child to receive mental health services that affirm their gender identity, a physician can not perform gender reassignment surgery or prescribe any pharmaceutical drug that affirms a child’s gender identity or expression, and no school, interscholastic conference, or organization that regulates interscholastic athletics from K- 12 and collegiate level shall knowingly permit people assigned male at birth to participate on a team with people assigned female at birth. Legislations such as House Bill 68 are direct attacks on trans youth, trans adults, and their families and loved ones. The right to bodily autonomy should be immutable, and that includes the ability to make medical decisions without the government interfering in your private life. New Voices for Reproductive Justice stands in strong opposition to this decision and believes this move is a gross and negligent overextension of power on the part of elected officials in Ohio. The decision to receive gender affirming care belongs to transgender people and their doctors. The ability to be affirmed in one’s gender identity is not a decision, it is a right. 

House Bill 68 is a two-tiered approach. The Ohio Senate approved the Bill to continue the separation of genders in sports by doubling down on gender being on the basis of assigned at birth. They confirmed this by making sure that the Bill included the restriction of gender-affirming holistic care, restricting the right to determine one's own gender identity. We do not need to look far to understand the impacts of this Bill. The National ACLU shared in 2021 doctors and health care providers input on sweeping legislation against transgender youth, finding a consensus of it being an intrusion on the practice of medicine and lifesaving care. The Department of Epidemiology at the University of Washington conducted a study in 2022 that concluded access to gender affirming care mitigates mental health disparities over 1 year and improves mental health for TNB youth over a short period of time. Gender-affirming care and affirmation in one’s gender identity saves lives. House Bill 68 is also meant to target transgender athletes from participating in sports with their peers of the same gender. The protection of transgender athletes has been adopted into policy for the National Collegiate Athletic Association since 2010 and then updated in 2022. Although not perfect, there are policies that seek to protect the inclusion of transgender people within the field of sports once in college and into professional leagues. Therefore House Bill 68 is not a “protection” legislation as the Ohio Senate is claiming, it is a malicious discriminatory Bill that is against human rights. 

“The attack on transgender youth in a settler-colonial country is a crisis,” says New Voices Policy Manager, Cheyenne Wyzzard-Jones, “Protecting youth is absolutely a reproductive justice issue.”In the state of Ohio, 2.15% of transgender people are Black and 4.13% are between the ages of 13-17 years old,  according to 2022 data from the UCLA School of Law William Institute.The implications to House Bill 68 if not followed are legally criminalized, a system that our communities are disproportionately targeted for. New Voices remains committed to taking a stand in support of Black youth across the country who face racist, sexist, traumatic abuses of power against their own bodies, families, and communities.