Ruling that the challengers' disapproval belongs in the arena of public opinion and not the courtroom, Franklin County Judge Michael Holbrook said the Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act – which keeps so-called "gender transitions" from taking place and prevents males from participating in female-specific athletic programs – does not violate the state constitution.
Jessica Franz of the Ohio Republican Party State Central Committee for Senate District 5 is "very excited that we have some protections in place for children" to prevent them from taking cross-sex hormones and undergoing so-called gender-transitioning surgeries.
Citing what she dealt with as a school board member in Bethel Township in Miami County, Franz says she has long been an advocate for the SAFE Act.
"As soon as I got elected to that board, I was faced with dealing with an issue where a male identifying as a female wanted to use the female bathrooms and locker room facilities," she accounts.
In that case, the superintendent unilaterally gave the individual permission to do so, without a vote from the school board, and it became a huge issue for the district. Muslims eventually filed a federal lawsuit over it.
"All that to say, I'm very familiar with the fight that is going on," Franz tells AFN.
After seeing how it affected the female students, she says her only issue with the SAFE Act is that it does not go far enough.
"We still don't really have anything in place legislatively that says males cannot use female bathrooms or locker room facilities and vice versa," she notes.
Franz firmly believes transgenderism is a mental illness and needs to be addressed as such. Instead, she laments that "we've got money-hungry doctors and medical lobbyists that are trying to take advantage of these children and making money off of their illness."
Surgeons declare the science is lacking
The American Society of Plastic Surgeons recently broke ranks with other major medical associations and renounced mutilative surgeries for children and adolescents who have gender dysphoria.
Dr. Quentin Van Meter, former president of the American College of Pediatricians, hopes this will help other organizations wake up.
"The politics have invaded, and … people who are essentially administrative staff take over and organize the organization so that physicians can practice … and not have to worry about admin. duties," he recently told Jody Hice. "As politics move in and money flows in and contributions flow in, the core administrators tend to take over and introduce [political] ideas as policy."
That, he says, is what happened with the Endocrine Society, with the American Academy of Pediatrics, and all of the groups that came forth with a rubber stamp of guidelines based off what they were told was the science.
The physicians at the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, however, have decided amongst themselves that based off what their own research, the science is, in Dr. Van Meter's words, "blatantly not there to support removing healthy organs and trying to transform a body to the appearance of the opposite sex from the biological sex."
"They just stood up and said, 'There's no science; we're not going to endorse this anymore,'" he relayed.
Speaking as a longtime pediatrician, Dr. Van Meter would especially like to see the American Academy of Pediatrics change course and acknowledge that experimental, mutilative surgeries on children are not based on fact, but "on hopes and whims."
