COLUMBUS, Ohio - Transgender people under age 18 wouldn’t be able to take puberty blockers or undergo surgical procedures if a draft bill in the Ohio House passed.

The legislation, sponsored by Republican Reps. Bill Dean of the Dayton area and Ron Hood of Pickaway County, was announced Tuesday by the lawmakers, along with Christian policy group Citizens for Community Values.

The legislation is still being drafted. The plan is to criminally penalize physicians who perform the procedures, said Aaron Baer, president of Citizens for Community Values.

“What we’re trying to accomplish in this bill is that these procedures cannot be done. It would cause sterilization, irreparable damage to children that can’t be reversed,” Hood said. “That’s what makes this such a problem. Decisions made in childhood that are very, very permanent and cause sterilization cannot be reversed.”

Ohio’s LGBTQ advocates and members of the medical community criticized the draft legislation.

Dr. Scott Leibowitz, a child and adolescent psychiatrist and medical director of the THRIVE Gender Development Program at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, said in a statement that the legislative effort pits the Hippocratic oath against the law.

“Evidence-based policy statements and clinical guidelines––published by every mainstream pediatric medical professional association––speak for themselves and are paving the path for minors to receive care that promotes the healthy outcomes the youth deserve,” he said.

In South Dakota, similar legislation was intended to stop procedures for youth under age 16. But it died in a Republican-controlled Senate Committee on Monday after the House had passed it, according to the Associated Press.

Similar measures are before legislatures in South Carolina, Florida, Missouri, Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky and New Hampshire.

Wells Logan, a board-certified pediatrician in the Columbus area, said he’s concerned about harm to children.

“It’s an identity crisis in children. They need counseling. They need help and for a boy to suggest that he wants to be a girl, every cell in his body is XY," he said, describing the chromosomes that determine biological sex. “For a girl, every cell in her body is XX.”

But is it the government’s job to tell doctors how to treat patients?

Baer said that the government gets involved in public health issues, such as prohibiting smoking cigarettes until age 21.

“There are plenty of areas where the government says this is so egregious, this is so dangerous to children that we have to intervene and protect,” he said.

Most of the time, medical procedures for youth must be cleared with parents. But there have been some exceptions.

In 2016, a Hamilton County teen who identified as transgender was hospitalized in the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center psychiatric ward for mental health issues. The hospital would not release the child to the parents since the teen had reported that the parents opposed hormone therapy and once made the child sit in a room and listen to Bible scriptures for more than six hours.

A judge ruled two years later that the child could live with grandparents, who were OK with hormone therapy, but she said the teen must undergo a psychiatric evaluation first, according to the Enquirer.

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