A Missouri judge has granted a temporary restraining order blocking a rule that would have required adults and children to undergo over a year of therapy before receiving gender-affirming treatments. These treatments include puberty blockers, hormones, and surgery. St. Louis County Circuit Judge Ellen Ribaudo issued the order, barring enforcement of the rule until May 15th unless she extends it. She also scheduled a hearing on the lawsuit challenging the rule on May 11th.
The lawsuit argues that the rule is discriminatory and sidesteps the Republican-led Legislature by regulating gender-affirming health care through Missouri’s consumer-protection law. Legal experts and transgender advocates say that if the lawsuit ultimately fails and the rule takes effect, it would make Missouri the first state to restrict gender-affirming care for adults and the first to enact such restrictions through emergency rule-making instead of through a new law.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri, which filed suit on behalf of transgender Missourians, applauded the ruling as “a win for transgender Missourians over an unprecedented attempt by the Attorney General to unilaterally legislate and harm their right to self-expression, bodily autonomy, and access to lifesaving health care.”
The attorney general’s office has said there are 12,400 Missourians who identify as transgender, and the ruling noted that the office estimated that 600 to 700 Missourians would begin intervention in the next year. Bailey’s emergency rule on gender-affirming care comes as Republicans across the country have proposed hundreds of laws aimed at transgender people.
While opponents of the rule have called it discriminatory and illegal, Bailey has argued that it would shield minors from what he describes as experimental medical treatments. However, Gillian Wilcox, deputy director of litigation for the ACLU of Missouri, said that allowing gender-affirming care is “giving people human rights.”
If Bailey’s rule takes effect, some transgender people have been trying to stockpile prescribed hormones or find alternative ways to get medications, fearful of losing access to the gender-affirming treatments many credit as life-saving. Some are considering leaving Missouri if the rule isn’t blocked.
Missouri’s Democratic House minority leader, Crystal Quade, has asked President Joe Biden and the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services for an executive order extending coverage to Missourians who seek gender-affirming care in other states. She has also asked the Democratic governors of Kansas and Illinois if their health care systems would accept Missouri patients for such care.
Meanwhile, Republican state lawmakers are fighting over competing Missouri House and Senate bills that would ban all gender-affirming care for minors. The chambers are split over which version to send to Governor Mike Parson, who is threatening to force the Legislature to keep working if nothing is done on the issue before their session’s scheduled May 12th finish.