Governor Mike DeWine (R-OH) signed a limited executive order on Friday banning transgender surgeries on children just one week after he vetoed a bill that would have prohibited all transgender procedures on minors.
DeWine’s executive order comes as Republicans in the state push to override his veto of the “Saving Adolescents from Experimentation” Act (HB 68), a bill that would have protected children from transgender surgeries as well as puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, which have life-altering impacts and can harm fertility, bone development, and heart health.
“There’s a broad, broad consensus against surgeries for minors, so let’s put that into a law so we can move on and talk about other things,” DeWine said on Friday after facing sharp criticism over his veto from Republicans like Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) and former President Donald Trump.
The state House of Representatives is expected to vote next week to override DeWines veto of the bill, which also would have kept men out of women’s sports.
In his executive order, DeWine said that he instructed the Ohio Department of Health to come up with rules to ban “gender transition surgeries” on minors. According to the Ohio Department of Health (ODH), the emergency rules filed on Friday “Prohibit health care facilities, including ambulatory surgical facilities, and hospitals from performing gender surgeries on minors.”
The ODH also filed draft rules that “Set forth quality standards for those hospitals and ambulatory surgical facilities that wish to treat gender-related conditions.”
According to a draft of the rules, “gender transition surgeries” are defined as “any surgery performed for the purpose of assisting an individual with gender transition that seeks to surgically alter or remove healthy physical or anatomical characteristics or features that are typical for the individual’s biological sex, in order to instill or create physiological or anatomical characteristics that resemble a sex different from the individual’s birth sex, including genital or non-genital gender reassignment surgery.”
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State Republican Rep. Gary Click, the primary sponsor of the HB 68, was not impressed with DeWine’s order, saying that it was no “substitute for solid legislation.”
”While I support his efforts as a temporary measure, I cannot accept them as a substitute for the SAFE Act. His suggestion that we take his measures and place them in a bill for his signature was insulting. He had ample opportunity to participate in the SAFE Act and he vetoed it. There are no mulligans.”
The Ohio House is expected to meet on Wednesday, January 10, to override DeWine’s veto.