On Wednesday, a Missouri judge blocked the state attorney general from enforcing a new rule that would restrict access to irreversible transgender care for minors and adults.
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican, drafted a new rule putting restrictions on this type of care, dubbed by left-wing supporters as “gender-affirming” care. This includes puberty blockers, hormone therapy, and sex reassignment surgery.
According to Fox News, St. Louis County Circuit Judge Ellen Ribaudo stayed the implementation of the rule hours before it was scheduled to go into effect. Transgeder advocates had sued to stop the law from being enforced. The judge reportedly wanted more time to review the matter and delayed implementation of the rule until 5 p.m. on Monday.
Townhall reported this month that the first-of-its-kind emergency rule came about after a bombshell report in The Free Press from a former case manager at a children’s transgender clinic.
Jamie Reed, a former case manager at the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, told the outlet about how “morally and medically appalling” “gender-affirming” health care is on young people. Reed worked at the center for four years and saw “around a thousand” young people who were struggling with their gender identity.
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“I left the clinic in November of last year because I could no longer participate in what was happening there. By the time I departed, I was certain that the way the American medical system is treating these patients is the opposite of the promise we make to ‘do no harm.’ Instead, we are permanently harming the vulnerable patients in our care,” Reed wrote in her piece.
“The mental health of these kids was deeply concerning—there were diagnoses like schizophrenia, PTSD, bipolar disorder, and more. Often they were already on a fistful of pharmaceuticals,” Reed explained. “This was tragic, but unsurprising given the profound trauma some had been through. Yet no matter how much suffering or pain a child had endured, or how little treatment and love they had received, our doctors viewed gender transition—even with all the expense and hardship it entailed—as the solution.”
After Reed’s story was published, a mother named Caroline came forward and said that she was “bullied” by medical professionals at the center to allow her son to receive a puberty blocker in his arm. And, the same doctors reportedly refused to remove it when her son began thinking about suicide, which Townhall covered.
Caroline told the Press that she never was able to discuss the gender-affirming treatment with the center’s staff without her son in the room. And at one point, a gender clinic staffer fired off statistics about suicide in front of her son.
“I was flabbergasted, and I really felt like this is not a meeting for me to get answers to my questions, and for everybody to have equal say,” Caroline told the outlet. “This is like I’m the last man standing and now it’s being implied that if I don’t okay this, I don’t care if my kid kills himself,” adding that it felt like “the therapist was planting the idea for him right there.”
“There’s no precedent for this type of treatment,” Caroline said. “How do they know this is the right answer? How do they go to this extreme?”
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