The Daily Signal - Ohio's DeWine Rushed to Ban Trans Surgeries After Vetoing a Bill Outlawing Them. Why?

Episode Date: January 10, 2024

On Friday, Ohio's Republican governor, Mike DeWine, issued an “emergency” executive order to ban sex-reassignment surgeries for minors just one week after he vetoed a bill that would have banned those same surgeries and addressed related issues. The General Assembly is expected to begin the process of overriding his veto Wednesday. Why did DeWine sign the order so quickly after vetoing the bill?  Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, chairman of the medical reform group Do No Harm, offered an explanation. In his interview with "The Daily Signal Podcast," he points to a video revealing a Cincinnati gender clinic as the reason DeWine moved to issue the order so quickly after vetoing the bill. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, January 10th. I'm Tyler O'Neill. I sat down with Stanley Goldfarb. He is a nephrologist and a former associate dean of the Perilman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, currently the chairman of an organization called Do No Harm, an organization focused on restoring the integrity of the medical profession. Specifically, as you'll hear from him, talking about the importance of of treating patients as they are not according to preconceived notions of gender identity, of activism, of critical race theory, et cetera. So Dr. Goldfarb and I sat down, and I think this is a particularly important point today,

because later today, the Ohio legislature is expected to override the veto of House Bill 68. This was Ohio's governor, who's a Republican Mike DeWine, he vetoed the House. House Bill 68, which is all about protecting children from experimental transgender medical interventions. And this bill had essentially three components. First, it would ban cross-sex surgeries, gender reassignment surgeries for children, for minors. It would also ban cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers for minors. And then it would also ensure fairness in women's sports saying that biological males could not compete against women in women's sports. So the legislature passed the bill with veto-proof majorities. Governor Mike DeWine decided to veto it. And when he vetoed it,

he did a few things. First, he said, I would still support banning gender reassignment surgery for children, but I don't know about the other things. He said he'd listen to people on all sides of the issue. And then he repeated transgender activist claims that, that people will commit suicide if they don't have access to these experimental medical interventions. He also said that a regulation from his office, from his administration, would be more likely to survive legal scrutiny, citing some legal battles that many of these similar bills have faced in other states. Importantly, most of those laws have succeeded in those legal battles as of right now. So even though there are legal challenges, it's far from clear that DeWine's argument here was correct. In any case, the legislature is about to override this.

And so Mike DeWine issued a veto. Immediately one week later, Mike DeWine issues what he calls an emergency executive order. And that does one third of what the bill he refused to sign did. and he said that an emergency exists requiring a ban on gender surgeries for minors. And it's interesting, Dr. Goldfarb gave us what he thought was the reason why Mike DeWine seemed to make this switch so quickly. And I think it's a very fascinating conversation. I have Dr. Goldfarb on.

So tune in to our discussion right after this. So what is going on with Ukraine? What is this deal with the border? How do you feel about school choice? These are the questions that come up to conservatives sitting at parties, at dinner, at family reunions. What do you say when these questions come up? I'm Mark Geine, the host of the podcast for you. Heritage Explains brought to you by all of your friends here at the Heritage Foundation.

Through the creative use of stories, the knowledge of our super passionate experts, we bring you the most important policy issues of the day and break them down in a way that is understandable. So check out Heritage Explains wherever you get your podcasts. This is Tyler O'Neill, a managing editor at The Daily Signal, and I'm honored to be joined by Dr. Stanley Goldfarb. He is the chairman of Do No Harm, very important nonprofit fighting for the integrity of the medical profession. Dr. Goldfarb, it's great to have you with us. Great to be with you, Tyler. So we're here talking about the issue of transgenderism.

And particularly we saw in Ohio, Governor Mike DeWine, he did this kind of two-step sort of thing. He decided he was going to veto a major bill banning gender affirming care for minors and also making the field right for women's sports, making a fair playing field. He vetoes that bill, and then he signs an executive order doing one-third of what that bill initially did. How has Duno Harm responded to that and why is it so important for an organization like yours to be engaged in an issue like this? Well, actually, one of our responses was that we helped publicize a video conference that was held at the Cincinnati Children's Hospital, which revealed the fact that the physicians. there were contemplating ways that they could hide from parents the fact that their children were undergoing transitions. And they did acknowledge the fact that they performed surgery on a

minor, at least one. And we publicized this. We put it out in the popular press. And I think that was one of the factors that led the governor to realize that he had a problem on his hands. And And I think his response, although I don't know this, I'm speculating, I think his response, though, reflected the fact that suddenly the public was being made aware of the fact that these surgeries were going on in these children and that this was done in a way that was Subrosa as far as the parents were concerned. And again, if you believe that parents should be deeply involved in their children's lives and certainly something as critically monumental for a child's life,

as a gendered transition effort, then, and you also believe that parents shouldn't be abusing their children, therefore not really helping in this activity, which we know really hurts many, many, many more children than it could possibly help. This is really an important, I think, bill that gets passed, and I think the governor was responding to the fact that he really had made a terrible mistake in vetoing it. I think he was true. trying to be compassionate. But, you know, compassion means that you're really ending up doing the right thing, not just making people feel good about what you've done. And, you know, all these parents came out and said, thank God the governor did this. And in fact, what they were doing was sort of consigning

their children that had been going down this path to a fate that's going to be very unpleasant in years to come. Can you talk a little bit about that surgery that you revealed through these videos? The commonest surgery that goes on to children is the so-called top surgery, which basically is a double mastectomy. They have to understand when they do that, they really don't take out all the breast tissue. So these children now that have had their breast removed, but not 100% removed,

have a lifelong risk of breast cancer that's going to be a terrible problem for them to be monitored because they don't have adequate breast tissue to really do a clear comparison, between normal and abnormal breast tissue. So from a radiologic standpoint, this is a real problem and a real challenge. So not only are they creating this mutilation, really,

but they're also creating another health problem associated with transgenderism, which is going to be a great deal of difficulty from monitoring a woman, it's still a woman, who has the risk of breast cancer. And, you know, it's unfortunately a very common condition in women. And so that's really what happened. You know, one of the young women who's undergone this,

now as a detransitioner, so-called, is Chloe Cole, who works with us, do no harm. And Chloe has had terrible medical problems associated with this procedure. It's not a benign procedure by any stretch of the imagination. It's a major procedure, and it has led to many complications, including healing problems, which lead to really both cosmetic as well as real, functional disabilities for these young women if the procedure doesn't go well. And occasionally it doesn't go well at all. So what other risks are you saying, you know, you've been a medical professor for many

years. Why are you engaged in this movement to restore medicine on issues like these? Yes. You know, I'm not an expert on gender care. I was, my specialty was kidney disease. I saw adults. I didn't care for children. I interact with children on occasion,

but that wasn't my main focus in my medical career. So I don't pretend to be an expert in this area, although I think any physician can appreciate the complications and are aware of the sorts of complications that occur. My own particular interest in this was coming from the other mission that do no harm has. that mission is to combat discriminatory practices in health care and identity politics that been injected into health care. And I see in the transgender world is yet another example of identity politics.

Once these children show up and express any interest at all in issues of what their proper gender orientation ought to be, they're suddenly put into the identity of being a trans kid. And then they're put on this pathway, this algorithm that's been created without thinking about them as individuals. So my interest in this became mostly driven by the fact that I want to see patients treated as individuals. I don't want to see them treated as a member of an identity group, be it whether they're African American, Latino, any other particular minority group that's been targeted as being a focus of so-called identity politics and medicine, the trans children are yet another example of this, calling these kids. Instead of saying,

saying, here's a child that's very hurt, very confused, unsure of how they should deal with these changes that are starting to occur to their body as they enter into puberty. Instead of understanding the sources of their confusion, their unhappiness, whether they have psychological problems that are underlying it, instead of understanding better their relationship with their parents and trying to improve that if it's deficient in any way, they're told, you're a trans child and we're going to start you on hormones and we're going to start you on puberty block. This is what's going on. And anybody who says that's not what's going on,

all they need to do is go on the website of many gender clinics who will tell you, we don't even need a note from a psychiatrist. We'll start you on hormones if you request it. And that's what's happening. And so my interest in this began as part of my general interest in seeing patients treated as individuals and not as members of a group.

Now, we've been fortunate to be able to work with individuals who have great experience in this area. Dr. Roy Epin is one of our senior fellows at Do No Harm. He's an endocrinologist. He's a gay man. And he's just recently written about this whole process, pointing out that this represents an example of trying to convert children from being gay.

Many children who express interest in transgenderism from very early time in life end up being gay individuals. And he is, and many other gay individuals. have pointed out that this represents, instead of allowing them to live a normal life as a gay person, they're being transitioned into something else, and then all of the medical and psychological complications associated with that. Dr. Miriam Grossman is one of our senior fellows, and she's a psychiatrist who's written brilliantly about this issue and in ways that it helped parents. January Little John, who's a wonderful parent advocate, works with us, and Chloe Cole, as I mentioned

before is a detransitioner who's worked with us and is amazingly articulate to point out what life is like for these children once they've gone through this procedure. So that's a long-winded answer to the question, but our organization does include individuals who are really able to speak about this with great expertise and experience. I can speak about it from a more theoretical standpoint and they can speak about it from an actual experiential standpoint. Well, and these detransitioners, people like Chloe Cole, it seems to me as if the mainstream medical movement that is pushing the gender affirming care model as a one-size-fits-all solution to a problem that I'm not sure we have fully understood, that they seem to almost ignore that people like Chloe Cole, exist. And I think this poses a big problem for the medical industry as a whole when so many of them are just overlooking the failures of a certain procedure that they encourage for everyone,

and then silencing dissent on it. Have you seen anything like that in medicine before? Well, you know, there have been adventures in medicine that have turned out to be terrible. One of the classic one has been the lobotomies story where this was done to control individuals who had psychological problems and somebody even won a Nobel Prize for lobotomies back in the 1920s and it turns out to be a catastrophe when it's occurred. So there are examples of these sorts of things that occur in medicine. So we have encountered this kind of medical experimentation in the past. But the detransitioner problem, as you say, is a really potentially very large problem.

We really have no idea of what the full dimensions of that really will be. Because it's clear that it can take many years before the full regret moves to the point where these individuals decide this has been a mistake. Now, that might occur a few months after they go through surgery or start on drugs. It might occur several years later. And unfortunately, the field has been looked at this whole thing in a very short-term fashion. So when a child starts on these hormones and expresses, I'm much happier now than I was after three or four months or even after a year,

no one has taken into account the possibility this is a placebo effect. We know in psychological problems, there's a huge placebo effect where if they get medication for a particular condition, the condition will dramatically improve. Now, a drug is shown to be effective if it's compared to a placebo and you show that incremental improvement is present, then a drug is eligible for approval and use. In this case, there's been no controlled study comparing this whole treatment to a treatment where you just support the child for a period of time. There are no real controlled studies of this condition.

There are no simultaneous, randomized entry of children into one protocol which gives them medications and one protocol which gives them so-called watchful waiting and psychological support to see what percentage of children really benefit. And even in the studies that have been done without the controls, there's very, very little evidence at all that these children have long-term benefit. Well, so the detransitioner question is how many of these children are going to regret what's gone on? And for the children that have already gone through these transgender care protocols and now regretted and a so-called detransitioners, there's been very, very little support. And just one thing I wanted to point out was that our organization,

to do no harm is sponsoring legislation called the Detransitioner's Bill of Rights. Yeah, I was about to ask. Yes, and so there really are three key elements to this bill. And the idea is to provide model legislation for states so that the state legislators who are interested in this have a substrate in which they can make their modifications to the bill and introduce the bill into the legislative process. So our bill has three main components.

The first component is informed consent. The informed consent ought to list all of the known complications of puberty blockers and hormones and ought to express them in great detail and then ought to give a detailed problem of the surgical procedures. And these have to be laid out in great detail. It can't be a superficial discussion of this or even a lack of complete awareness of what the possible complications are. So that's part one. Part two is transparency to find out exist. what's going on in the medical community. How many people are getting these medications,

how long have they been getting these medications, and so on. And the third part is an ability to sue physicians and institutions that have put them through this, and then subsequently, these children decide this was a terrible mistake, but they weren't given the right information that allowed them to understand that at the time. But the point is most malpractice is only a three-year window. This is a 25-year window because it's going to be several years, maybe even a couple of decades,

before they appreciate that they made a terrible mistake and that they've ruined their lives. It also allows for a four-year discovery. Once they identify the problem, they will have time to sue as well. So we think this will be very important, and ultimately I think this will be the final way that we'll be able to control this tremendous increase in so-called transgender affirming care.

Thank you so much, Dr. Goldfar, for joining us. Where can the people follow your important work and check out this model legislation? Thank you, Tyler. This is do-no-harmmedicin.org. Do-no-harm medicine is one word, and it's on our website. It's the model legislation. They can read it for themselves, and they can see what other activities were involved in. in supporting families that have their children going through this as well as the detransitioners.

Thanks again so much. Thank you very much. Really enjoyed it. Thank you. That was Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, chair of Do No Harm. If you liked what you heard here and if you like what the Daily Signal podcast brings, feel free to leave us a five-star rating and review. We read all of your feedback.

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