The following article was originally published on News5Cleveland.com and is published in the Ohio Capital Journal under a content sharing agreement. Unlike other OCJ articles, it is not available for free reprinting by other news outlets as it is owned by WEWS in Cleveland.
An Ohio bill to limit health care for LGBTQ+ youth, which was pushed back by Republican lawmakers in November, was reintroduced Wednesday morning, a Republican representative announced at a news conference.
Rep. Gary Click, a Republican from Vickery, reintroduced the SAFE Act in 135th The General Assembly after a bill banning doctors from performing sex-change surgeries on minors failed to pass last year.
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Click said at a press conference Wednesday morning that the bill does not deny health care to transgender children, arguing that 85% to 95% of children who feel trapped in the body of someone of the opposite gender outgrow that feeling. as an adult. reports Jo Inglesa reporter and producer for the State News Bureau.
OCJ/WEWS’ Morgan Trau reported last year that the bill was written without a basic understanding of the people it would affect, and that Click had never spoken to any members of the trans community before authorizing, introducing or testifying on the bill.
Based on Ingles’ reporting from Wednesday’s press conference, the reintroduced SAFE Act is largely unchanged from last year’s version and would require hospitals to report anonymous data about gender reassignment diagnoses, in addition to denying sex reassignment surgery and hormone blockers for minors.
Click said at the press conference that the bill has the support of GOP House Speaker Jason Stephens and GOP Caucus Leader Derek Merrin, with Stephens saying he considers it priority legislation.
As reported by OCJ/WEWS earlier this year, Stephens won the speakership by brokering a deal with Ohio House Democrats, telling his colleagues from across the aisle at the time that he would work with them to the issues that unite them.
“They needed our votes, and we took the opportunity to make sure that we were going to work with the speaker that we thought at the end of the day was going to work with us on issues that we could agree on,” the Democratic minority leader., Allison Russo said in January.
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Follow WEWS State House Correspondent Morgan Trau at I tweet AND Facebook.
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