COLUMBUS, Ohio, February 18, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) – Republicans in the Ohio Legislature announced their intentions this week to introduce legislation that would punish doctors who subject minors to gender “transition” treatments, to the chagrin of LGBT activists.
Under Reps. Ron Hood and Bill Dean’s Protect Vulnerable Children Act, it would become a third-degree felony (generally punishable by nine months to three years in prison and/or fines up to $10,000) for a physician to perform any sort of gender-alteration treatment on anyone under 18, The Cincinnati Enquirer reported. Parents could also bring civil suits against physicians for doing so.
“What we are concerned about here is that Ohio's most vulnerable children are being subjected to experimental, unproven and expensive treatments and surgeries,” Hood argued at a press conference last week. “This bill is dealing with children under 18, who would be subjected to these procedures which are irreversible, and these decisions are obviously being made by children. The best suicide prevention is to cure and guide, not to sterilize.”
The proposal has the support of the Ohio group Citizens for Community Values (CCV), which brought a woman identified as Maria to the statehouse to share her experiences with doctors who claimed her child was transgendered. She believes doctors are forcing parents to keep quiet.
“They are afraid they will lose their jobs,” she said, WKSU reported. “They are afraid of trans activists that will find them and threaten them into silence. And we are afraid for our lives,” Maria said. “But we are terrified that if this treatment continues as it is, we will be part of a medical catastrophe that this world has never seen.”
“The problem is these are children,” said Dr. John Wells, a pediatrician and neonatologist at Nationwide Children’s Hospital (NCH). “And they're being coerced by medical providers who've been influenced by the political climate to make decisions that can be life altering.”
On the other side, the pro-LGBT group Equality Ohio has already announced its intentions to fight the bill. Dr. Scott Leibowitz, a NCH psychiatrist who also directs the hospital’s THRIVE Gender Development Program, went so far as to claim the bill conflicts with doctors’ Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm.”
“These are fear-mongering tactics to prevent youth from receiving the evidence-based care they so desperately need and time and time again has proven to lead to positive emotional and psychological well being for an under-served population,” he charged.
In fact, a range of medical literature suggests that exposing gender-confused children to “transition” treatment is what’s incompatible with the Hippocratic Oath, in no small part because fixating on “gender affirmation” tends to distract from exploring other issues that may be at the root of a patient’s mental or emotional unrest.
In 2017, the University of Cambridge’s Stonewall report found that 96 percent of trans students in Scotland attempted self-harm through actions such as cutting themselves, and 40 percent attempted suicide. Forty percent in the United States have attempted suicide, as well, according to a 2016 survey from the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE). According to a 2011 study out of Sweden, trans people remain 19 times more likely to commit suicide than the general population, even after sex-reassignment surgery.