Area transgender residents react to looming gender affirming care ban

Spike in acute mental health problems among top concerns.

The Ohio Senate is expected to meet later this month and follow the House in overriding Gov. Mike DeWine’s veto of a bill that would prohibit transgender minors from undergoing gender affirming hormone treatments and surgeries in the state and ban transgender girls from participating in girls’ and women’s scholastic sports.

Transgender men and women from the Miami Valley — specifically those who began their medical transition when they were much older than 18 — told this news organization that they’re concerned about the impact taking away such medical treatments will have on a future generation of transgender Ohioans.

This includes Bobbie Arnold, a 43-year-old transgender woman in rural Preble County who started feminizing hormones in her mid-30s. Arnold said she would have jumped at the opportunity to have begun her transition earlier in life.

“Looking back, absolutely, I would have undergone this at the earliest age possible. I can just imagine how different my life would be — would have been — if I had had access to that at an earlier age,” Arnold said.

Arnold explained that eliminating the option of puberty blockers could be particularly harmful to transgender women, who, if forced to go through male puberty, could experience physical changes that would make it significantly harder “for them to be able to go through this life and blend with society.”

“The changes that we experience going through puberty, especially as transgender women, a lot of those changes cannot be undone later in life,” she said.

Arnold is a Democratic candidate for the Ohio House in a deep-red district currently represented by Rep. Rodney Creech, R-West Alexandria.

Creech, who voted in support of the legislation each of the three times it hit the House floor, told this news organization that his district is in “full support” of the legislation and said he was proud to represent his constituents’ interests with his votes.

“I would say that the adverse effects of the treatments probably

AVERY KREEMER / STAFF Protesters chant the word “shame” after the Ohio Senate passes an amended version of House Bill 68, banning minors from undergoing gender affirming medical treatments, at the Statehouse in Columbus, on Dec. 13.