A Message to Governor DeWine Regarding the Ohio SAFE Act: Sign It

Governor DeWine, please take your cues on the Ohio SAFE Act, not from a handful of children you visited in the hospital this week, but from a medical expert, Dr. R. Kaltiala, the chief adolescent psychiatrist who developed and headed the first gender identity service in Finland and oversaw the care of more than 500 such adolescents over 12 years.

In an article published just two months ago in October, Dr. Kaltiala shared, “Gender-affirming care is dangerous. I know because I helped pioneer it.”

In your hospital tour, Governor, you won’t hear about the negative consequences because, as Dr. Kaltiala explains: “Usually, it takes several years for the full impact of transition to settle in. This is when young people who have entered adulthood confront what it means to possibly be sterile, to have damaged sexual function, to have great difficulty in finding romantic partners.”

Dr. Kaltiala has seen the human toll of “gender-affirming care” for 12 years and says, “It is devastating to speak to patients who say they were naive and misguided about what transition would mean for them, and who now feel it was a terrible mistake. Mainly these patients tell me they were so convinced they needed to transition that they concealed information or lied in the assessment process.”

Years from now, the “so-convinced” patients you visited will be confronted by the stark personal price of these procedures.

After studying the evidence regarding youth gender transition, Finland’s national medical body, Council for Choices in Health Care (COHERE), concluded in 2020 that the studies touting the success of the “gender-affirming” model were biased and unreliable. The authors wrote: “In light of available evidence, gender reassignment of minors is an experimental practice.”

Dr. Kaltiala writes, “The report warned that young people, whose brains were still maturing, lacked the ability to properly ‘assess the consequences’ of making decisions they would have to live with for the ‘rest of their lives.’”

The known consequences include infertility, sterility, osteoporosis, liver damage, mental health issues (including suicide ideation), and skeletal bone thinning. I know about consequences; I detransitioned over 30 years ago.

Governor DeWine, please don’t place the lives of vulnerable children at risk. I pray that you take the opportunity to honor and glorify God and join the U.K., Sweden, Finland, France, and Norway and protect Ohio’s youth by signing the Ohio SAFE Act (H.B. 68).