Missouri can continue protecting children from permanently damaging transgender drugs and surgeries, a judge ruled recently, blasting ‘gender transition’ procedures as ‘untested.’

by Matt Lamb

Missouri can continue to protect gender-confused children from damaging drugs and surgeries, a judge ruled recently.

Cole County Judge Craig Carter upheld the Save Adolescents from Experimentation Act. It prohibits transgender drugs and surgeries intended to make minors look more like the opposite sex. The law also prohibits taxpayer funding of the procedures.

These procedures are sometimes called “sex change operations,” although it is not possible to change one’s sex.

Judge Carter ruled in favor of the state on several grounds. He cited a recent 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in favor of Indiana’s similar law. The Supreme Court of the United States will hear a case next week, on December 4, concerning Tennessee and Kentucky’s prohibitions.

Carter said there is “an almost total lack of consensus as to the medical ethics of adolescent gender dysphoria treatment.”

Indeed, the “World Professional Association for Transgender Health” (WPATH), a transgender activist group, has been caught advocating for the procedures to be labeled “medically necessary” in order to get insurance to pay for them. It also tried to pressure other medical groups to endorse its “Standards of Care.”

Despite WPATH’s already lax standards, President Joe Biden’s gender-confused assistant secretary of health and human services, Richard “Rachel” Levine, pressured the group to remove even age minimums for surgeries. Furthermore, one pro-transgender researcher withheld the results of a study that found no benefits from puberty blockers. She did this despite receiving $10 million in taxpayer dollars for the study.

Judge Carter also pointed out that most gender-confused children – around 85% – grow out of their confusion without chemical or surgical interventions.

“Essentially, it seems that all of this untested, non-emergency, possibly unethical, possibly unnecessary [so-called] care would be performed on children and adolescents when the vast majority of minors would simply outgrow the condition by the time they reach adulthood,” Judge Carter ruled.

He also found that the enormous growth in the number of gender-confused individuals does not have a concrete explanation, but noted that medical authorities have suggested that “interventions” may actually be the cause of the increase.

The ruling also cited England’s Cass Review, which found that there is a lack of evidence in support of chemical and surgical interventions for gender-confused minors.

The drugs and surgeries have been linked to suicidality, bone density loss, and numerous other medical problems. Puberty blockers can also cause infertility, as would be expected from drugs intended to stop the normal and healthy development of reproductive organs.

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey celebrated the ruling in a statement provided by Alliance Defending Freedom.

“The Court has left Missouri’s law banning child mutilation in place, a resounding victory for our children. We are the first state in the nation to successfully defend such a law at the trial court level,” Attorney General Bailey stated. “I’m extremely proud of the thousands of hours my office put in to shine a light on the lack of evidence supporting these irreversible procedures.”

“We will never stop fighting to ensure Missouri is the safest state in the nation for children,” he pledged.

Alliance Defending Freedom also helped defend the law.

“Driven by ideological agendas, activists and the Biden-Harris administration have pushed these dangerous procedures across the country and are attempting to prevent states from exercising their rightful role to regulate the medical profession and protect kids,” Senior Counsel Hal Frampton stated in the news release.

“These procedures have devastated countless lives, which is why countries that were previously leaders in so-called ‘gender affirming’ care are reversing course and curtailing these experimental efforts to alter children’s bodies,” he stated.

European countries have restricted the procedures for minors, as documented by LifeSiteNews.

The ruling followed a “nine-day bench trial” that included expert testimony. Jamie Reed, a whistleblower who warned about lax standards when it came to gender-confused children, was one of the experts who testified. She previously worked at Washington University’s Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, as LifeSiteNews previously reported.

According to Reed, she soon became aware of what appeared to be a “social contagion” element behind transgender identification, especially in girls.

“Sometimes clusters of girls arrived from the same high school,” she said.

“In just a two-year period from 2020 to 2022, the Center initiated medical transition for more than 600 children,” she previously claimed. “About 74 percent of these children were assigned female at birth [i.e., girls].”

Her claims comport with those made by social scientists and formerly gender-confused individuals who have attested that transgender identification is driven by peer pressure and social media.

by Mexico News Daily

United States President-elect Donald Trump confirmed on Monday that he plans to use the U.S. military to carry out his proposed mass deportation operation, an initiative that could result in millions of immigrants being sent to Mexico.

On his social media platform Truth Social, Trump shared a Nov. 8 post by the president of the conservative group Judicial Watch, Tom Fitton, who, citing “reports,” wrote that the incoming Trump administration is “prepared to declare a national emergency and will use military assets to reverse the Biden invasion through a mass deportation program.”

The Times also reported that “one major impediment to the vast deportation operation that the Trump team has promised in his second term is that Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, lacks the space to hold a significantly larger number of detainees than it currently does.”

However, it noted that Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration policy adviser, said in late 2023 that military funds would be used to build “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers” for immigrants as their cases progressed and they waited to be flown to other countries.

The news website Axios reported that “Trump’s mass deportations are expected to impact roughly 20 million families” across the United States.

There are an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, a significant number of whom are Mexican. Former foreign affairs minister and current Environment Minister Alicia Bárcena said in February that there were 5.3 million undocumented Mexicans living in the United States.

In addition to Mexicans, the United States could attempt to deport nationals of other countries, such as Venezuelans, Nicaraguans and Cubans, to Mexico.

Citizens of those nations “are sometimes unable to be deported to their origin countries for diplomatic reasons,” The New York Times reported.

Mexico ‘must be ready’ for mass deportations, but is it?

Mariana Aparicio Ramírez, a National Autonomous University (UNAM) academic and member of the Observatory of the Mexico-United States Binational Relationship, said in an interview with the newspaper El Financiero that “Mexico must be ready for arrests [of immigrants in the United States] and the mass return of Mexicans and other latinos.”

“Trump has the support of the citizens and that means that what is politically incorrect can be politically viable,” she said.

President Claudia Sheinbaum has pledged to “defend” Mexican migrants at risk of deportation, and advised them to seek advice or assistance at Mexican consulates in the United States.

Sheinbaum, who spoke to Trump by telephone two days after his Nov. 5 election victory, hopes that Mexican officials can meet with the incoming president’s transition team before he takes office on Jan. 20 to put forward a case against mass deportations.

The United States economy would inevitably suffer from the deportation of a large number of workers, a point Mexican officials would likely raise with members of Trump’s team.

Nevertheless, it appears likely that Mexico will receive a significant number of deportees during Trump’s second term as president, if not the millions he has promised to expel.

As Mexico News Daily reported earlier this month in an article on what a second Trump presidency will mean for Mexico, the Mexican economy — currently slowing — could struggle to provide jobs for large numbers of deportees who suddenly find themselves in Mexico after being uprooted from their lives in the U.S.

The Washington Post reported last week that migrant advocates in Mexico “are alarmed at what’s coming,” noting that they have said that “sending millions of jobless Mexicans back to towns they left years ago could create chaos in areas already suffering from poverty and organized crime.”

The Post spoke to two men who run migrant shelters on the Mexico-U.S. border for an article it headlined “Trump promised mass deportations. Mexico isn’t ready.”

“Neither the shelters nor the border area nor Mexico are ready for this,” Héctor Silva, a Protestant pastor who runs the Senda de Vida migrant shelter in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, told the Post.

Migrant shelters in Mexico’s border cities already struggle to accommodate migrants who make the long and dangerous journey through the country in their attempt to reach the United States.

Francisco Gallardo, a Catholic priest who runs the Casa del Migrante shelter in Matamoros, another border city in Tamaulipas, told the Post that “no one is prepared for deportations” of the magnitude Trump has spoken about.

“Neither the governments nor the civil society organizations,” he said.

Adam Isacson, a migration analyst and director for defense oversight at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), said that deportees to Mexico “will be thrown into a new kind of poverty” because they won’t be able to find jobs with wages comparable to those they earned in the United States.

That situation “will make them more desperate,” he said.

Deportees could even be tempted to work for organized crime groups in Mexico, one of the largest employers in the country, according to a 2023 study.

One person who is less concerned about Mexico’s capacity (or lack thereof) to absorb large numbers of deportees is Arturo Rocha, a former senior immigration official in Mexico.

“We are prepared to receive large numbers; we have done this before,” he told the Post. “But the key question is, how massive will massive deportations be?”

Sheinbaum, who also faces the task of defusing Trump’s tariff threats, appears optimistic — or at least hopeful — that the number of immigrants deported won’t be as high as the incoming U.S. president has said it will be.

Asked last week about the potential impact of deportations on remittances to Mexico, Sheinbaum simply said, “We hope there is no impact,” i.e. that no, or virtually no, Mexican immigrants are deported.

For his part, Trump’s incoming “border czar” Thomas Homan said in October that deportations during the second Trump administration wouldn’t be “a mass sweep of neighborhoods” to detain undocumented immigrants.

“It’s not going to be building concentration camps. I’ve read it all. It’s ridiculous. It’ll be concentrated. They’ll be targeted arrests,” he said.

With reports from Axios, The New York Times, El Financiero and The Washington Post