Gov. Mike DeWine is one of only a handful of Republican governors to veto restrictions on transition-related care for minors or bans on trans student-athlete participation.
Ohio’s governor vetoed a bill Friday that would have restricted both transition-related care for minors and transgender girls’ participation on school sports teams.
Gov. Mike DeWine’s veto makes him one of only two Republican governors to veto a restriction on gender-affirming care, alongside then-Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson in 2021, and one of only three Republican governors to veto a trans athlete bill after Utah Gov. Spencer Cox and Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb last year.
In a news conference on Friday after his veto, DeWine said the “gut-wrenching” decision about whether a minor should have access to gender-affirming care “should not be made by the government, should not be made by the state of Ohio,” rather it should be made by the child’s parents and doctors.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Ohio’s governor vetoed a bill Friday that would have restricted both transition-related care for minors and transgender girls’ participation on school sports teams.
Before vetoing the bill, DeWine told The Associated Press that he had visited three children’s hospitals in the state to learn more about transition-related care and spoke to families who were both helped and harmed by it.
State Rep. Gary Click, a Republican and the bill’s primary sponsor, said this month that minors are “incapable of providing the informed consent necessary to make those very risky and life-changing decisions” regarding their health care, according to WCMH-TV, an NBC affiliate in Columbus.
One of them, Dr. Christopher Bolling, a retired pediatrician who spoke on behalf of the Ohio Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told NBC News that the bill targets a very small number of adolescents.
“Across the country and across various sports, female athletes are losing not only titles and awards to males but also roster spots and opportunities to compete,” Gaines said.
However, in 2021, The Associated Press reached out to two dozen state lawmakers who supported restrictions on trans athletes and found that it has created a problem only a few times among the hundreds of thousands of American students playing sports.
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