Democrat leadership in Ohio is silent on whether the party will support a bill that would protect the right of parents to affirm the correct sex of their children.
Ohio’s Democrat Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio and House Minority Leader Dani Isaacsohn did not indicate support for Ohio’s recently introduced Affirming Families First Act, which says that affirming a child’s sex is not a form of neglect or abuse, when asked for their position on the bill by The Daily Wire.
“At this time, the office is not providing a comment. Our focus remains on issues Ohio families care about most, including affordability, access to services, and accountability in state government,” Isaacsohn’s office told The Daily Wire.
Antonio did not respond to The Daily Wire’s multiple written and verbal requests for comment on the bill. Amy Acton, the frontrunner to be the Democrat’s candidate for governor in Ohio, also did not respond to The Daily Wire’s requests for comment on the bill.
Democrats have made a concerted effort in states across the country to focus on issues such as “affordability” ahead of the midterm elections, avoiding discussions of far-left policy positions that hurt them in 2024. The legislation in Ohio comes as Democrat candidates steer clear of radical gender ideology.
In states like Ohio, where lawmakers have embraced radical gender ideology in the past, parents who insist on their children’s biological sex and given name risk losing custody of their kids to the state. Republicans pushing for the bill say the goal is to protect parents.
“No parent should lose custody, face state intervention, or be deemed unfit simply for affirming a child’s sex,” Ohio Representative Josh Williams, the bill’s co-sponsor, told The Daily Wire.
Though leadership declined to take a position, after The Daily Wire sent inquiries, one Democrat lawmaker in the state reached out to call the bill a “direct attack on the LGBTQIA+ community,” and particularly on “transgender children and their families.”
“This legislation is not about protecting kids. It is about using the power of the state to stigmatize parents who are seeking medically recommended, evidence based gender affirming care and to make it harder for families to support their children,” Tristan Rader, an Ohio House member, told The Daily Wire. “We should be making it easier for parents to access appropriate health care and mental health support, not harder.”
President Trump highlighted the importance of protecting families from being labeled as abusive for rejecting gender ideology at Tuesday’s State of the Union address when he told the story of Sage Blair, whose parents were denied custody of the Virginia teen for not affirming her transgender identity, as reported by The Daily Wire in 2023.
“A left-wing judge refused to return Sage to her parents because they did not immediately state that their daughter was their son,” Trump said during the speech.
Virginia lawmakers have failed to pass “Sage’s Law,” a bill that would protect a parents right to affirm their child’s correct sex.
During the State of the Union address, President Trump called for federal action to protect families from the harms of gender ideology.
“Surely we can all agree no state can be allowed to rip children from their parents’ arms and transition them to a new gender against the parents’ will. Who can believe that we’re even talking about it? We must ban it, and we must ban it immediately,” Trump said.
Laura Hanford, senior policy analyst at the Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Human Flourishing, explained that without federal action, families in all states remain at risk of gender ideology’s harms.
“Even if we pass protections in red states, kids can run away to blue states where many of them simply assert custody if they are there for sex-rejecting procedures. They throw parental rights out the window entirely,” Hanford told The Daily Wire. “We need a federal solution—these blue states, aided by a network of non-profits, are enticing kids to run away or be trafficked by ‘affirming’ adults to access sex-rejecting interventions. It’s essentially a country-wide underground network dedicated to enticing kids away from parents.”
When Democrats failed to stand and applaud Trump’s call to protect children from being transitioned to another sex without parental consent, it led to one of the most memorable moments of his speech.
“These people are crazy,” Trump said as he pointed to the Democrats.
Hanford said the Democrat fear to support the common-sense legislation is the powerful “gender lobby.”
“Congressional Democrats are entirely in the pockets of the billion-dollar gender lobby,” Hanford said. “They viciously attack any deviation,”