‘We Gift-Wrapped It for Him’: DeWine Drags His Feet on Bill to Protect Kids and Girls’ Sports

It was the first time Morgan Keller told her story in public. Looking around the room of Ohio senators, she said quietly, “This week is the fifth anniversary of my first testosterone shot.” She was told it would save her life. She was told, as so many young people are, that it would keep her alive, happy, and healthy. A half-decade later, after hormones and a double mastectomy destroyed her life, an emotional Morgan admits, “I wish I had been told ‘no’ by the practitioners I trusted. I wish I could say I’m the exception to the rule, but … I come to you wearing the scars of this medical scandal.”

Morgan, like so many victims of the phony promises of gender activists, woke up one morning awash in regret. With heart-wrenching clarity she realized that this was all “a desperate last-ditch attempt to become someone else — to escape my own trauma and body and mental health issues.” In that moment, she made the “immediate” decision to detransition. “I quit testosterone cold turkey and endured four of the most brutal months of my life.”

Shattered by the permanence of her situation, Morgan told the hushed room that she decided to kill herself. “I would cry upwards of 10 times a day — shocked at what I had been allowed to do to my body in such a vulnerable state … I would lay in bed all day, sitting with the realization that I would never be able to breastfeed children that I didn’t even know I wanted at the time [of] my mastectomy. I didn’t know if those feelings would ever go away. So, I started to make plans to commit suicide.”

Morgan sent a letter to her practitioner, the one who prescribed the drugs that put her on this path. “She never replied,” Morgan winced.

She told her story in the hopes that children in Ohio never wake up and “[find] themselves in my position.” The state’s legislators, many of whom were in the room that day, listened. With supermajorities in the Buckeyes’ House and Senate, they sent a bill protecting kids from Morgan’s fate to Governor Mike DeWine’s (R) desk. And there it still sits, much to Ohioan’s confusion and dismay.

DeWine insists he’s taking his time — for what, no one knows. “It’s a two-fer,” the bill’s author, Gary Click (R) reiterated to “Washington Watch” guest host Jody Hice, “because it also includes [a policy saving] women’s sports. … So we’ve gift-wrapped both of these bills for the governor. Sent them to him. And they’re sitting on his desk.”

Asked what the hold-up could be, Click isn’t sure. “I’ve had conversations with the administration, and listen, we’re putting the right people in front of him. The governor is asking the right questions. They are giving him the right answers. I don’t know how he can avoid coming to the right conclusion. Our governor does care about kids. He has not, until recently, I don’t think, had the opportunity to study this issue,” he explained. “And we know that the other side of the hospitals are doing a lot of fear-mongering, and they’re trying to tell him that trans kids are going to die and things like that. … [B]ut we’re putting the people in there to counter that argument … medical professionals, doctors … parents and detransitioners.”

At the end of the day, Click says, “I have to believe the governor is going to do the right thing.” But, he admitted, “We have no guarantees. We have no promises. But as that clock ticks… [we’re] all on pins and needles,” including the victims like Morgan. “They’re ready just to burst into tears of joy when the governor signs this bill.”

Thinking back on her testimony in late November, Click — who’s also a pastor — talked about how haunting it was to hear that Morgan had also reached out to her longtime therapist. “And she said, ‘You know, you failed me. You didn’t ask all the key questions you should have asked.’ And her therapist said, ‘I’m sorry, I think I did fail you. I just wanted to affirm you.’ And what a terrible excuse that is,” Click lamented. “This is experimental. They don’t know what they’re doing. They’re just guessing at it.”

And yet, in conversations with several hurting parents, the state rep pointed out that most of their stories are the same. They start to ask questions of the “experts” and they’re told “the only choice we have is hormones and to affirm our child as the opposite sex. … We just get bullied if we ask any other questions.”

For now, their hopes — and the hopes of every Ohioan — rests in the governor’s hands. “DeWine should sign this commonsense bill,” Family Research Council’s Quena Gonzalez told The Washington Stand. “Children too young to make lifelong choices should not be asked to ‘consent’ to gender transition procedures that can leave them scarred and sterilized for life. Girls should not have to compete against boys in school sports. Hopefully, the governor is listening to the brave young people who testified before lawmakers that they tried to transition, realized they’d made a horrible mistake, and are now living with life-long loss because the adults in their lives didn’t protect them from the lies of gender ideology.”

And, hopefully, Gonzalez continued, he’s also “paid attention to other Republican governors before him who burned their legacies down by blocking or vetoing similar bills. He’s surely hearing from opportunistic gender transition providers that profit from medicalizing kids for life by performing experimental gender transition procedures. Ohioans need to make their voices heard, now.”