Attorney General David Yost says the decision to appeal a state court ruling allowing transgender youth to be prescribed puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones is a “no brainer.”
We submit the lack of brain power is manifested in this case by Mr. Yost’s fellow Republicans who in 2011 were too clever by half and created the constitutional amendment that enabled the American Civil Liberties Union to win this ruling in its favor.
In 2011, Ohio Republicans proposed and passed an amendment to ensure that Ohioans could opt-out of Obamacare without the penalty that the Affordable Care Act attempted to impose.
That Health Care Freedom Amendment contained a sentence stating that, “No federal, state, or local law or rule shall prohibit the purchase or sale of health care or health insurance.”
That sentence showed up as the key reason for the three-person Ohio 10th District Court of Appeals’ decision this week overturning the state’s new ban on transgender care for minors as unconstitutional. The lengthy opinion came down to the fact that the 2011 Health Care Freedom Amendment empowers Ohioans to access whatever “health care” they want — without government obstruction.
The state of Ohio’s legal position in arguing for the law appears to be that the state has the right to define health care however it wants, totally unburdened by professional opinion or best practices of the industry.
By extension, the legislature claims to reserve to itself the right to restrict the language of any state constitutional amendment simply by imposing its own unqualified definitions on the terms of the state constitution without any grounding in common parlance.
We submit that when the voters approved the Health Care Freedom Amendment they were not thinking of letting the General Assembly redefine the English language.
It is undeniable that the medical industry in this country is all in on transgender health care through the use of hormones, puberty blockers, and even surgery.
Many of us may not like it, or are disturbed by therapy that would disfigure a child undergoing adolescence because of that child’s confusion about his or her gender. But it is literally the consensus of the medical establishment that puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones are appropriate therapy for the condition known as gender dysphoria.
It should be, but probably won’t, be a lesson to future legislators when crafting constitutional amendments to consider how they might come back to bite them in the rear sometime in the future.
Accepting some limitations on its goal of prohibiting extreme medical intervention in youth experiencing gender dysphoria might have resulted in a constitutional law that would have ensured such procedures would be employed only in rare instances.
First Published March 22, 2025, 4:00 a.m.
