Defend Bodily Autonomy: End Ohio’s War on Trans Youth
In 2023, seven bills were introduced in the state of Ohio that sought to restrict the rights of LGBTQ individuals, including House Bill 68. HB 68 bans gender-affirming care for minors and restricts athletic participation for trans athletes. This attack came not long after the 2022 midterm elections where Democrats managed to maintain control of the U.S. Senate by weaponizing the repeal of Roe v. Wade and ongoing attacks against LGBTQ individuals to mobilize their supporters to the ballot box. And yet, in 2023, according to the ACLU, there were 510 bills put forth in 47 states that sought to restrict the rights of LGBTQ individuals. Ohio Democrats took no measures to protect marginalized groups. Their false promises amount to nothing and continuously leave Ohioans to take action into their own hands like with Ohio Issue 1, Right to Make Reproductive Decisions Including Abortion Initiative (2023), a citizen-led amendment.
After Ohio Governor Mike Dewine initially vetoed HB 68, a decision hailed by the the LGBTQ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign, Dewine followed this action by signing an executive order on Jan. 5, 2024 that bans gender transition surgeries for minors. At the time of this order, no children’s hospitals in Ohio perform gender-affirming surgery on patients under 18. At the same time, Dewine announced a new set of administrative rules that would require approval from a psychiatrist, endocrinologist and a bioethicist before any form of gender-affirming care could be administered to both minors and adults. Similar to so-called TRAP (Targeted Restrictions on Abortion Providers) laws, these restrictions serve only to create additional hurdles that serve as de facto bans on healthcare access. These rules would also seek to collect and publish data on transgender health care in the state of Ohio. The Ohio House and Senate also voted to override the veto of HB 68. The law will go into effect on April 23, 2024.
On Jan. 29, 2024, the ACLU announced they will file a lawsuit to challenge the ban on gender-affirming care for minors and seek an injunction halting the law before it takes effect. Alongside this, weeks of public outcry led the Dewine administration to amend their proposed administrative rules. They will no longer apply to adults, and the bioethicist requirement has been dropped. However, the collection and publication of data around transgender health care will proceed with some additional tweaks. Anonymity will be maintained, but the data collected combined with the sporadic nature of trans healthcare, especially given the additional restrictions on access, could lead to data manipulation to support additional anti-trans bills in the future.
Make no mistake, these challenges are a good thing. We should challenge HB 68 on the grounds that attacks against trans healthcare are attacks against the bodily autonomy of all Ohioans. However, it is imperative that we do not rely solely on these types of legalistic challenges. We have seen what happens when Democrats fail to enshrine into law the rights that they supposedly support after the overturning of Roe v. Wade at the federal level. Democrats use the threat that, under a Republican administration, executive orders can be rescinded and administrative rules can be changed. This threat is then used as a cudgel to force the most vulnerable to continue to support a party that has shown itself to be, at best, ineffective, and at worst, deceivers of the working class. Even if Democrat led governments were good on their word, signing executive orders and issuing guidance on the interpretations of existing laws to protect the health rights for individuals is not enough. We must continue to fight these bills and laws as they are put forth. We cannot keep relying on an increasingly right wing judiciary to interpret our laws and constitutions in a way that keeps us safe. We must go a step further.
Rather than abandoning and punishing trans youth and the teachers and care providers who support them, we should be passing laws to protect them. With some additional help from gerrymandered state districts, the conservative lawmakers in Columbus are working overtime to attempt to legislate trans individuals out of existence. This is unacceptable. When these same lawmakers passed a highly restrictive abortion ban, the people mobilized and united to pass a constitutional amendment enshrining the right to abortion and reproductive care. In the face of similar attacks on trans individuals, Cincinnati Socialists demands that we use the same procedure to enshrine the right to gender-affirming care.