We Oppose Bill Banning Gender Affirming Care

House Bill 68, the so-called ‘Saving Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act’, that would ban chil­dren, in Ohio, from get­ting gen­der affirm­ing care, is cur­rent­ly being con­sid­ered by the Ohio House Public Health Policy com­mit­tee. SHoWLE President Douglas Berger sub­mit­ted writ­ten tes­ti­mo­ny to oppose the bill:

Chairman Lipps, Vice Chair Stewart, Ranking Member Liston and mem­bers of the Ohio House Public Health Policy Committee, my name is Douglas Berger and I am President of the Secular Humanists of Western Lake Erie. I am writ­ing today to express our oppo­si­tion to House Bill 68, The Saving Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act.

We are dumb­found­ed how a bill that is based on a false nar­ra­tive, fake evi­dence, and reli­gious big­otry could even be under con­sid­er­a­tion.

Representative Gary Click, who spon­sored this bad bill is a pas­tor of a church in Fremont and he mis­lead the com­mit­tee when he claimed his reli­gious beliefs weren’t the dri­ving fac­tor for this bill and he said he was fol­low­ing the sci­ence yet believes the debunked method of con­ver­sion ther­a­py is a thing. Rep. Glick also fraud­u­lent­ly tried to equate social tran­si­tion with gen­i­tal muti­la­tion.

We would­n’t be shocked if the Christian Nationalist group Center for Christian Virtue wrote this bill for him.

A 2022 study esti­mates that about 0.5% of all U.S. adults, some 1.3 mil­lion peo­ple, and about 1.4%, or 300,000, of youth between 13- and 17-years-old iden­ti­fy as trans­gen­der, hav­ing a dif­fer­ent gen­der iden­ti­ty than the sex they were assigned at birth.

Polling also indi­cates that major­i­ty of peo­ple oppose dis­crim­i­nat­ing against Trans peo­ple. House Bill 68 is dis­crim­i­na­tion pure and sim­ple and we are sad and dis­ap­point­ed that this big­otry is even being con­sid­ered. Don’t let a small minor­i­ty of reli­gious big­ots use the pow­er of the state to impose their reli­gion on oth­ers.

We ask that you vote against this bill and let par­ents in Ohio sup­port their chil­dren.