Last week, the Ohio Legislature passed a sweeping bill targeting what many conservatives say is the gravest threat facing the U.S. today: a tiny demographic of transgender teens. The bill bans both gender-affirming care for minors and trans girls’ participation in girls’ school sports.
The bill is unique in that it combines the two biggest — and largely unrelated — anti-trans conservative talking points, youth transition and trans athletes, into a single bill. While the state’s Republican governor, Mike DeWine, may veto the bill, the Legislature has a Republican supermajority and is likely to override any veto.
In many of the states that have put these clauses in place, gender clinics and hospitals have suspended gender affirming care programs anyway.
In a token gesture at moderation, the state’s Republican legislators added a grandfather clause for youth to continue any gender affirming care they’re currently on. Similar conditions have been added to other trans care bans in states like Missouri and North Dakota.
On their face, grandfather clauses like this seem like efforts at compassion. Even anti-trans forces recognize it’s a bad idea for the government to rip teenagers off a medication they’re already taking every day.
But these clauses aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. In many of the states that have put these clauses in place, gender clinics and hospitals have suspended gender-affirming care programs anyway. In Missouri, two transgender boys are suing the University of Missouri after it suspended its gender-affirming care program in August. The lawsuit argues that the two boys should be able to continue treatment under the state’s grandfather clause, but university president Mun Choi told The Associated Press that the school “would follow the law of the land.”
Another gender clinic in the state, the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, stopped providing gender-affirming care in September. (The clinic was also the target of trumped-up charges of wrongdoing from a former staffer.) Officials at the hospital said in a statement that the new law “creates unsustainable liability for health-care professionals.”
In North Dakota, a similar scenario is developing after the state passed a gender-affirming care ban with a grandfather clause in April. The state’s exception for those already receiving care is an element of a lawsuit brought by Gender Justice, a legal group focused on legally fighting gender-based injustice. One of the plaintiffs, 12-year-old Tate Dolney, now has to travel out of state for his appointments. The grandfather clause causes providers “to not even risk it, because that vague law doesn’t give them enough detail of exactly what they can and cannot do,” according to Gender Justice senior staff attorney Brittany Stewart.
Trans youth in these states are left behind by everyone, from the government to their own doctors.
Politically, these clauses are designed to make Republicans appear somewhat moderate and to mask just how suddenly politicians are intruding into the private family matters of ordinary citizens who happen to have trans children. But legally, the clauses are worthless.
Providers of gender-affirming care have to take measures to protect themselves against zealous conservative lawmakers and administrators who are obsessed with stamping trans people out of public life. These providers can read the political tea leaves and don’t want to risk a battle against the government. Unfortunately, it makes sense from a business standpoint for these health care systems to cut and run and abandon their vulnerable trans patients. If it’s impossible to gain new paying patients with a treatment, then there’s no incentive to devote resources to their current customers — excuse me, patients. But that means trans youth in these states are left behind by everyone, from the government to their own doctors. No one is seemingly willing to take a stand for them, outside of the lawyers taking these states to court. Imagine yourself as a teenager. You take a medication every day that keeps your body from morphing into something unrecognizable. And then suddenly, somebody from hundreds of miles away rips that medicine away from you and declares that your body must change according to their wishes. What we’re doing to these poor kids is barbaric. These kids and their parents should be allowed to make these medical decisions in private. They deserve to live their lives without the meddling of some political hacks hoping to further their careers by stepping on a bunch of marginalized teenagers.
Katelyn Burns is a freelance journalist based in New England. 
