Recently, Ohio governor Mike DeWine vetoed a bill (Ohio House Bill 68) that his own Ohio Republican party-majority House and Senate passed to ban “gender transition care” for youths under eighteen, which would include hormone therapy, puberty-blocker medication, and so-called “gender reassignment surgery.” Governor DeWine defended his veto decision by appealing to the “life-saving” nature of gender-affirming care. Here’s how he put it:
This bill would impact a very small number of Ohio’s children. But for those children who face gender dysphoria, and for their families, the consequences of this bill could not be more profound. Ultimately, I believe this is about protecting human life. Many parents have told me that their child would not have survived, would be dead today, if they had not received the treatment they received from one of Ohio’s children’s hospitals.
DeWine’s motive for vetoing Ohio’s bill is laudable. Who doesn’t want to save human life? But DeWine fails to consider whether the means of “gender-affirming care” is the best way to go about it.
There are two approaches that we could take here. One is to examine the morality of so-called “gender-affirming care.” If such “treatment” is ethically wrong, then DeWine’s desire to protect human life is irrelevant in discerning whether the Ohio Legislature should approve it.
What would be at work here is the fundamental ethical principle the end never justifies the means. No matter how good an end is, it can never be justified to use an immoral means to achieve it. The classic example that illustrates this principle is robbing a bank to provide for the financial wellbeing and security of my family. Such security is a good end to pursue. But that doesn’t morally justify me robbing a bank.
DeWine clearly doesn’t view “gender-affirming care” as being morally problematic. So challenging this view would be a worthwhile project. But I’m going to put that off for another time.
What I want to share here is a bit simpler—namely, that so-called gender-affirming care does the opposite of what DeWine intends to achieve by advocating for it. A recent study, for example, published in the journal Pediatrics showed that trans youth “had higher odds of all suicidality outcomes, and transgender males and transgender females had high risk for suicidal ideation and attempt.”
Other studies have confirmed such findings. According to Paul McHugh, former psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital and University and Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, “ten to fifteen years after surgical reassignment, the suicide rate of those who had undergone sex-reassignment surgery rose to twenty times that of comparable peers.” McHugh made this statement based on a follow-up study of people who received the surgery that extended over thirty years in Sweden, where the culture is very supportive of transgender people.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services acknowledged the results of the study in Sweden, which found high rates of suicide, along with other mental illnesses, among transgender people. Its memo states,
The study identified increased mortality and psychiatric hospitalization compared to the matched controls. The mortality was primarily due to completed suicides (19.1-fold greater than in control Swedes), but death due to neoplasm and cardiovascular disease was increased 2 to 2.5 times as well. We note, mortality from this patient population did not become apparent until after ten years. The risk for psychiatric hospitalization was 2.8 times greater than in controls even after adjustment for prior psychiatric disease (18 percent). The risk for attempted suicide was greater in male-to-female patients regardless of the gender of the control. Further, we cannot exclude therapeutic interventions as a cause of the observed excess morbidity and mortality. The study, however, was not constructed to assess the impact of gender reassignment surgery per se.
Given the above evidence, it’s not the banning of so-called “gender-affirming care” that fails to protect human life. Rather, it’s the encouragement of people to undergo genital-mutilating surgery and body chemistry-distorting hormone regimens that actually does the harm.
DeWine would do well to consider the above statistics if he sincerely desires to protect human life. And in doing so, he might be more inclined to support his state’s Legislature to ban such “gender-affirming care”—not just for children, but for all who suffer from gender dysphoria. Such a ban would be the more reasonable means to achieve DeWine’s desired end. Self-mutilation is not the answer. Psychiatric help is.
For more information on this topic, see my latest book, The New Relativism: Unmasking the Philosophy of Today’s Woke Moralists.