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.
