Rest easy, Missouri — your state legislators are courageously confronting what is apparently the most dire threat facing residents of the Show Me State today.
No, it’s not the unchecked proliferation of firearms, which has given Missouri among the highest gun death rates in America. No, it’s not our grossly underpaid teachers and understaffed, poorly performing school systems. No, it’s not our inadequate infrastructure system, still among the nation’s worst.
What lawmakers in Jefferson City have been diligently focused on this week is stamping out the growing scourge of … transgender rights.
A raft of new bills would further crack down on already-restricted medical treatment for gender dysphoria for younger patients; address the crucial issue of bathroom usage; require teachers to report to parents what their kids say in confidence; and create strict new legal definitions for the word “sex.”
Does everyone feel safer now?
Any discussion of gender today should acknowledge the discomfort that many Americans have with issues like gender-related surgery, or the potential unfairness of allowing athletes to compete outside the gender they were assigned at birth, or unfamiliar norms regarding use of public bathrooms. Preemptively dismissing such discomfort as garden-variety bigotry shuts down any constructive discourse on those topics.
But acknowledging that discomfort needn’t — and shouldn’t — mean stoking fear and disdain toward a tiny minority of society. Or exaggerating the scope of the issues for political leverage. Or facilitating government intrusion into the personal and medical decisions of private citizens and their families.
As the Post-Dispatch’s Jack Suntrup reports, conservative Missouri lawmakers on Wednesday began introducing multiple new legislative proposals regarding transgender issues, following up on last year’s anti-trans free-for-all in Jefferson City.
Given the myriad gender-related proposals in both chambers of the Legislature, you’d think these issues impact most Missourians, or at least a significant portion of the state.
They don’t. A little over 1% of Americans identify as transgender, with far fewer who actually undergo medical or surgical gender-related treatment.
Yet finding ways to restrict the medical options and societal rights of trans citizens — and even deny their very existence — has, once again, been designated a front-burner issue by the Legislature’s controlling Republicans.
Much of the new legislation is aimed at restrictions on medical treatment and other issues regarding trans youths. As always, supporters of such restrictions claim they are “protecting the children.”
To which the first question should always be: Protecting them from whom? Their own families? Their own doctors?
Such ideological constructs require an almost comic-book vilification of the people who are actually in kids’ lives. As if parents and physicians are just waiting for the chance to maliciously “experiment” on their own patients and their own children, to cite a too-common right-wing trope.
In the real world, gender-related surgery on minors is vanishingly rare. But gender dysphoria (a disconnect between one’s biological gender and gender self-identity) is real, and is a serious medical issue for young people affected by it. Treatment prior to adulthood often includes hormones and puberty blockers.
Again, many in society aren’t comfortable with these topics. But shouldn’t the greater discomfort be reserved for politicians who broadly impose their own ideological beliefs into the medical decisions of their constituents?
Missouri last year prohibited puberty blockers and hormone therapy for minors, but set a 2027 expiration date on that prohibition and made exceptions for treatments already underway.
Newly introduced measures this year would eliminate that expiration date, making the prohibition permanent — and would force minors currently under treatment to stop.
How in good conscience do these politicians (most of whom have no medical training) substitute their personal ideological views for the medical judgment of doctors who treat these troubled kids, and the parents who love them?
Untreated gender dysphoria among teens has been solidly associated with elevated suicide levels. Did these lawmakers bother to consider that before attempting to dictate the details of individual medical situations they know nothing about?
More broadly, some of the legislation proposed this week is clearly designed to attack the very notion that transgender citizens have the right to that identity. For example, House Bill 2309 would dictate that the word “gender” in statute “shall be considered a synonym for ‘sex,’ and shall not be considered a synonym or shorthand expression for ‘gender identity.’”
Another measure requires teachers to report to students’ parents when the kids confide “discomfort or confusion about the student’s documented identity.” Because nothing says “protect the children” like making sure that already-troubled kids are barred not only from appropriate medical treatment but even from the comforting ear of a teacher. That’s not protection, it’s cruelty.
