Ohio judge Michael Holbrook of the Court of Common Pleas in the Civil Division vacated a temporary restraining order on H.B. 68 today. We originally posted these clips of the public comment hearing exclusively for paying subscribers last November. It is now unlocked for all.
“My body was permanently altered because of the beliefs of adults that the soul of a boy can inhabit the body of a girl,” Prisha Mosely told the Ohio State Senate Government Oversight Committee yesterday. “I was subject to medical experimentation due to this unverifiable, unscientific, faith-based belief.”
Speaking on H.B. 68, the Saving Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act, Mosely told legislators that so-called ‘gender affirming care’ has inflicted “severe and lasting injuries” on her body and health. “I was promised male puberty,” she said, “and instead I got irrevocable damage.”
Diagnosed with anorexia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, and depression after enduring a sexual assault and resulting pregnancy termination at 14, Mosely was “utterly convinced” by clinicians that she had been “born in the wrong body, and that hormones and surgery were the cure” for her self-harm behaviors. It was a lie.
(CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE ENTIRE VIDEO)
Mosely (Twitter/X) is new to public speaking. Telling her story in public is not easy. Nevertheless, Mosely presented a panel at the recent Genspect conference explaining how the gender industry offers a false panacea for the real pain of vulnerable youth and received a standing ovation. Expect to see more of her.
Two more detransitioners, Morgan Keller and Richard Anumene, told the committee about their experiences as well. Despite their pain and shame, the number of young Americans willing to speak this truth to powerful people is growing all the time. ‘Gender medicine’ created them, so the clinicians have no one but themselves to blame.
Of the dozen witnesses who spoke over two hours, three were detransitioners. One, Matt Sharp, represented a conservative organization, the Alliance Defending Freedom. Contrary to expectations, very few conservative organizations have actually dared to enter the fraught political terrain of ‘gender medicine’ so far, and the ADF has stood out from the field.
In other words, this is a grassroots phenomenon. Attempts to frame it as something else will look increasingly silly over time. The apologists of ‘gender affirmation’ are therefore already making up excuses for what they have done. What they still fail to understand yet is that they have created a new oppositional leadership cadre already.
Yesterday’s hearing was a preview of the gender debate in 2024 — and how the framework of that debate will take shape all the way until 2034 and beyond. (CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE ENTIRE VIDEO.) These are our future leaders. Someone in this set of clips will likely hold elected office one day.
As seen in the clip above, Kristina Roegner (R-Hudson) is the chair of the committee introducing the speakers. Paula Hicks-Hudson (D-Toledo) is the ranking Democrat. Republicans have the ‘trifecta’ of state government, holding the house, senate, and governor’s mansion all at once. Ohio used to be a reliably blue state, but now Democrats are almost unelectable outside of urban centers. Paula Hicks-Hudson is a blue, metropolitan Democrat “from a family of physicians,” in her own words.
She is also a lawyer, meaning a legal advocate really, but nevertheless a member of the Ohio bar who hangs her shingle on a law office. As a powerful member of her party, then, what she really represents is not the ideology of ‘trans,’ or a queer theory of gendered being, but the inscrutable interests of the trial lawyers of Ohio. What the trial lawyers of Ohio think about the potential medical malpractice liabilities of ‘gender medicine’ will be what she thinks.
As the opinion of Ohio’s trial lawyers on this question changes, so will her opinion. Anyone who has spent a minute in American state politics is nodding along with me right now.
Here is Corinna Cohn, a self-described disenchanted transsexual (Twitter/X). Not a detransitioner, Cohn still became so horrified by the abuses of ‘gender medicine’ quackery that now he advocates for age restrictions and real information before giving ‘informed consent.’
“If you had asked me two decades ago whether minors should be allowed to undergo gender transitions, I might have responded affirmatively, but with conditions,” Cohn said, reciting the steps he had to go through.
“In recent years,” however, “we’ve seen a significant decline in the regulation and safety of gender medicalization for minors.” There are no real standards, no real informed consent. Parents are being extorted with suicide blackmail. “The statute of limitations shields doctors and therapists from consequences for putting children on these pathways,” Cohn explains.
Hicks-Hudson had no questions for most of the speakers, but she spent a few minutes pushing back against Cohn on this point because she simply could not believe that any doctor, therapist, or clinician would ever harm their patients, ignore available standards of care, and engage in unethical experimentation.
Cohn described creating a nonprofit organization, conversing with clinicians, and discovering to their dismay that “everyone we talked to say that they don’t follow the guidelines. They think that they’re too strict.” The most recent set of so-called standards from WPATH lowered age limits in an express effort to “avoid legal liability for the practitioners,” Cohn pointed out.
Hicks-Hudson suggested that the state legislature should “work with” clinicians on standards of care rather than pass legislation. Cohn replied that the the legislature is the “regulator of last resort” because unethical physicians will always choose to undercut the ethical ones by ignoring standards of care that have no force in law.
Also note that Cohn displayed perfect parliamentary ettiquette with the senator. Like Mosely, Cohn gave a presentation at the Genspect conference that received a standing ovation. His topic was effective advocacy organizing. Here at The Distance, we do not use preferred pronouns, but we recognize political skills, and Corinna Cohn has them in spades.
Cynthia Mullen is the nice lady with glasses seen to the left of Riley Gaines in this clip. (She spoke right after Cohn at about the 1:15:00 mark in the full video.) Mullen spoke about protections for women’s sports which are embedded in the legislation. She quit her NCAA job over Lia Thomas. Paula Hicks-Hudson attempted to frame Mullen as racist, though in a nice way, for speaking about “bodies.” After all, some people made racist remarks about Venus and Serena Williams that one time!
The exchange is worth watching. However, the more instructive clip is how Riley Gaines got no pushback whatsoever from Hicks-Hudson. In fact, I get the impression that Democratic office-holders are literally terrified of Riley Gaines. They should be. She has real political chops, a steel trap mind, and the primal relentlessness required to be a successful candidate.
Captured NCAA administrators and ‘progressive’ activists have made her into the acknowledged leader of a movement to save women’s sports. If she ends up in the United States Senate, that is who the Democrats should blame for it.
Finally, Jeannette Cooper is a mom — and a former Democrat. She was representing Partners for Ethical Care, an all-mom organization opposed to the “unethical and misinformed health care providers” who keep telling parents to sterilize their children, or else lose them to suicide.
“It’s impossible to be born in the wrong body,” Cooper said. “The mind is part of the body. It isn’t separate from it.” Cooper calls the ‘affirmation model’ “snake oil.” Parents are “emotionally coerced” into harming their children only to see their mental health spiral. “This is not life-saving care,” she says.
Cooper’s online support group has “10 to 15 people applying” every day. “I am here with observations and experience from dealing with thousands of trans-identified children [to say] that we know what prevents suicide, and it’s not affirmation,” she says. Instead, children need help growing up into their bodies.
“We support our children’s social, emotional, and physical needs as human beings in their natural male or female bodies,” Cooper said of her parents’ group.
At the conclusion of her testimony, Roegner asked Cooper to share her own story of losing her only daughter to the cult of transgender affirmation.
She said that she was a boy. No one can change sex. I used her name and pronouns, that wasn’t enough. Today, she wears a bra, she wears makeup, nail polish, she’s beautiful, and she still says she’s not a girl. I’m still prohibited from seeing or talking to her, other than sending her postal mail, because it seems that Cook County, Illinois believes that names and pronouns are a serious endangerment.
Note that Paula Hicks-Hudson had nothing to say to Jeannette Cooper — no ‘buts’ to insert in the form of a question. As a lawyer familiar with medical ethics and at least minimal working awareness of malpractice law, Hicks-Hudson knows better than to risk making the jury even more sympathetic to the plaintiff by attacking their grief.
As a Democrat, perhaps she now also realizes what a mortal threat the angry parents of trans-identified youth represent to her party’s future.
We let our kids wear what they want and cut their hair however they please. We accept and love our children as lesbian or gay. We are liberal, like me, and conservative; we are atheist, like me, and religious; we are former Democrats, like me, and former Republicans. We are diverse.
“I have only voted Republican once, and I survived,” Cooper quipped. Democrats nationwide must take heed of the electoral consequences and realize she is not joking. None of these parents are joking. None of the detransitioners are joking. None of the disaffected transsexuals are joking. Some of them are going to end up on political stages, either endorsing candidates who promise to defy the trans cult, or else running for office themselves — and winning.
Because it is simply the term for the fractious universe of people who do not buy into gender ideology, the ‘gender critical movement’ was never going to cohere as a total political realignment. However, there will be long-term consequences for partisan political resistance to the critics of gender ideology, and we can already see that future taking shape.
The Ohio Senate Committee Hearing That Previewed the American Debate in 2024