Urgent: OHIO SAFE ACT is in Trouble (at the Hands of a Pro Life Republican Chair)

Ohio House Bill 454, The Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act, was introduced 5 months ago. The bill states: “It is of grave concern to the general assembly that the medical community is allowing individuals (children) who experience distress at identifying with their biological sex to be subjects of irreversible, permanently sterilizing genital gender reassignment surgery, despite the lack of studies showing that the benefits of such extreme interventions outweigh the risks.” 

This bill, if passed:

• Expresses the General Assembly’s findings regarding gender transition procedures, particularly for minors.

• Prohibits specified medical health care professionals from providing gender transition procedures to minors and from referring minors to a medical doctor for those procedures.

• Prohibits the distribution of public funds to organizations or individuals that provide gender transition procedures to minors.

• Prohibits insurance coverage of gender transition procedures for minors and tax deductions for any amount paid for gender transition procedures to minors or as health insurance premiums for coverage that includes these procedures for minors.

• Prohibits Medicaid coverage of gender transition procedures for minors.

• Prohibits health care services provided by or in a state, county, or local facility or by a physician employed by the state or other state employee from including gender transition procedures for minors.

• Prohibits school nurses, counselors, teachers, principals, or other staff or officials from withholding, or encouraging or coercing a minor to withhold, from the minor’s parent or legal guardian, information that a minor’s gender identity is inconsistent with the minor’s biological sex.

• Establishes penalties for those who provide gender transition procedures to minors.

This is an incredibly important bill, and Ohio is in urgent need of the protections it will bring—to safeguard children, to prevent unnecessary medicalization of mental distress, and to provide legal recourse for a growing trend of destransitioners, who have realized that “transition” did not help their distress.  Bill 454 is urgently needed. While Sweden, Finland, France, and the UK have stopped or curtailed medical transition of children, Ohio is full-steam ahead on gender transition of minors, with seven gender clinics in Ohio that are transitioning minors, despite poor quality evidence of need and efficacy, and virtually no long term outcome studies. Kids— mostly teenage girls—in Ohio are getting surgeries, the majority being bilateral mastectomies. The transgender activist lobbies are running the show, without the oversight of our government and ethical medical practitioners, and oftentimes over the objections of parents. Other states, like Florida are stepping up to stop harmful gender transition. It’s time for Ohio to follow suit and show some leadership in protecting our children.

Unfortunately this bill is in trouble: As Maria Polaris, co-founder of Cardinal Support Network (CSN) states, “As we understand it, the Chair of the Family, Human Services and Aging Committee, Susan Manchester, has decided to table the bill and work on her campaign instead of setting the next two previously planned hearings.  These hearings last about 2 hours each which is important to act now, especially considering the medical abuse that the transgender affirming industry has already inflicted on Ohio families. We have an expert team ready to testify in favor of the bill, and then the hearings suddenly stopped.”

Manchester needs to follow through with her promise to give the bill the public hearings it deserves. Ms. Manchester and her committee understand this complex issue and the crucial import of passing this bill. Parents met with Manchester in a private Zoom meeting and shared their stories with her and other GOP legislators. Gary Click, Sponsor of the SAFE ACT, has also met with Maria Polaris and anther parent and committed to help parents after hearing their stories. As Polaris states: “We met with Ms. Manchester and shared our horror stories, and have traveled to the State house for three years talking to legislators. Parents have even put up three Ohio billboards to get legislator’s attention on this problem (pictured).

This is a case of failed GOP leadership, and Gary Click cannot help us on his own. The election cycle should not be allowed to derail the urgent protections that the SAFE Act will provide for Ohio’s children. It’s time for us to press Susan Manchester and other GOP leadership to act in defense of Ohioans.

Contact Susan Manchester today via the Ohio House website or on Twitter and demand that she set hearings for the SAFE ACT (HB454), or face a reelection loss.

Speaker Cupp, who works closely with Manchester, can also get this back on track. His term is over, but he still has time to do the right thing and protect Ohio children. He has 26 GOP HB 454 bill co-sponsors and the majority of Ohioans support the bill. Please contact Representative Cupp via the Ohio House website or on Twitter.

In the meantime, we urge families to avoid gender clinics, and to find out your school’s policy about gender ideology and what agencies are presenting information to students and staff, especially the school clubs. Talk to your school board and give them an example of a policy you believe would help kids, not hurt kids. Parents in Ohio need to work together to protect our kids from the insidious gender ideology that is encouraging them to undertake harmful psychosocial “social transitions” and medical actions that will cause lifelong damage to their healthy bodies—all to the cheers and accolades of well-meaning but uninformed adults in our communities.

Background on the Issue:

Despite rosy stories depicted by the media, gender “care” is supported by low quality evidence, with little understanding of long term outcomes. It violates the long-standing ethical principle of ‘First do no harm.’ The suppression of debate by activist therapists, gender clinics, media, and powerful lobbyists are driving dangerous, misleading health care decisions made by parents with children who are suffering from gender dysphoria, a mental health disorder. 

We have known for years that research shows that most children, if left alone and not socially or medically transitioned, will desist from their cross-sex identification during or after puberty. This fact alone demonstrates that children should not be “transitioned”. They are likely to change their minds, if left to grow up naturally. As from Singh, Bradley & Zucker an important new study with the largest sample group to date found only a 12.2% persistence rate in transgender identification, while 87.8% of the sample group desisted and 63.6% grew up to be gay. This latter point is why we contend that transition is actually gay conversion therapy, since social transition of pre-pubertal children may prevent them from growing up to be gay.

Long term outcomes of transition and side effects are not even being tracked. We have no idea what will happen with these medicalized children in 5, 10, 15, 20 years and beyond. This is shaping up to be an experiment on children with tragic results that will reverberate through Ohio for generations. Already we’re beginning to see it: Dr. Stephen Levine, an Ohio psychiatrist, notes that we need to be concerned about the suicide rate in adults, post transition which is 19 times higher than those individuals who sought counseling.

Activists state that gender affirming care is “lifesaving” and mass suicides will result if they are stopped — however, recent studies of suicide mortality is the absolute risk of suicide is low according to the recent review from SEGM, Society for Evidence Based Medicine.  The proportion of individual patients who died by suicide, 0.03%, is far lower than the proportion of transgender-identifying adolescents who report attempting suicide when surveyed.  It is commonly understood now, by those who have read the source materials, that the suicide myth is used to blackmail parents into allowing gender “treatments” for their children - or else risk losing them to suicide.

Cincinnati Children’s attracted the court’s attention with this lie during a custody dispute 7 years ago.  “The court expressed “concern” that the Transgender Program at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital deemed “100% of the patients…who present for care” to be “appropriate candidates for continued gender treatment.” Put differently, the judge seems suspicious that just as everything’s a nail to a person with a hammer, every troubled kid is “transgender” to a gender “specialist” with hormones to dispense.” In addition, the judge stated: “Troubled adolescents are not the only ones who use manipulation to force hasty capitulation to “gender affirming” treatments. The court found it “particularly troubling” that the “initial filings in this case indicate that suicide is a potential factor to be considered by the Court, when in the medical records admitted during trial it is clearly not.” In other words, the county and the hospital filed papers with the court suggesting the threat of the teen’s “imminent suicide” was reason enough to approve hormone treatments.” 

Background on the Gender Situation in Ohio:

We have seven gender clinics in Ohio all tucked into Children’s Hospitals.  Cincinnati Children’s Transgender Clinic (CCTC) is a leviathan gender clinic partnering with Living with Change (LWC), a powerful and rich transgender lobby treating children and young adults ages 4- 24.  They began transitioning kids in 2013, boasting over 2400 patients, mostly notably teenage girls.  These girls did not experience early onset gender dysphoria. Instead, they fit the ROGD (Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria) model, as described by Lisa Littman. 

In 2015, Dr. Conard of Cincinnati stated in court that 100% of their patients are appropriate for medical treatment—a ratio that confirms that differential diagnostics are not being applied to these children.  And it’s not just about medicalization—LWC is selling trans as a lifestyle needing lifelong body modifications and social changes. LWC sells binders for girls and promotes legal name changes for children, among other activities.  Polaris states: “These trans lobbies make a lot of money facilitating medical transition through their products and galas.  It’s gaslighting our children into believing their bodies are wrong, initiating a wrong sex puberty, and locking them into this false opposite sex identity for life.  The founders of LWC have begun transition (chemical castration) of their own child since age 8, giving $2 million dollars from their sex toy business, Pure Romance.”

Other Institutions:

Planned Parenthood of Southwest Ohio has partnered with Cincinnati & Dayton Transgender Clinics creating a partnership with their new gender affirming hormone business in 2020.  Manchester should care deeply about this. PP is prescribing wrong sex hormones to 18-year-old adolescents after they ‘graduate’ from pediatric clinics according to Dr. Heather Steward, Pediatrician, Dayton Children’s Hospital, Chief Medical Office of Adolescent Medicine.

Background on CSN:

Parents of Cardinal Support Network (CSN) represent all political identities and sexual orientations.  CSN offers a website that supports parents, guidance on therapists and education of the general public regarding the “gender affirming” industry. These parents avoid the gender clinics because they are not fully assessing our child’s health histories; they only want to transition them. CSN believes that the SAFE ACT is essential for the safeguarding of children, amidst the social contagion of gender ideology. The SAFE ACT promotes mental health care as the appropriate method of treatment, as evidence abounds indicating that the resulting in a majority of children who experience gender confusion desist after natural puberty is allowed to occur.  Further, the ‘affirmation only’ approach disregards the evidence that gender confusion disproportionate affects kids who have comorbid mental health issues, traumas, or neurological differences such as autism.  Parents may sign up with our community on the contact page of www.CardinalSupportNetwork.com.