Month: April 2023

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey is doing Nazi shit:

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey said Thursday that his emergency rules restricting transgender-related health care will affect adults.

There had been questions about whom the rules cover, but in an interview with St. Louis Public Radio, Bailey said they affect children and adults. Some providers of treatment like hormone therapy and gender transition surgery contend the regulations are so onerous that they’ll result in gender-affirming care being shut off for everyone.

While part of Bailey’s rule exempts these restrictions for people who are already undergoing gender-affirming care, Brandon Hill, CEO of Vivent Health, said the guidelines are so restrictive that providers would be hesitant to give care to anyone.

“This could lead to the discontinuation of that care if the health care providers are not able to meet all these new requirements that are both antiquated and not based in science at all,” said Hill, whose company provides services largely to LGBTQ people and has clinics in St. Louis and Kansas City.

Bailey’s rules come during a fierce debate in Missouri and around the country about whether treatments like puberty blockers, hormone therapy and gender-reassignment surgery should be legal for minors. Republicans have said they need to pass such legislation as a way to protect children.

But after Bailey’s rules were released last week, there was no mention that the regulations would only affect minors. Some of the requirements include having three years of documented gender dysphoria, a screening for autism and at least 15 hours of mental health care.

“These are intended to protect all patients and make sure that all patients have access to mental health services, and that all patients understand the experimental nature of the drugs,” Bailey said.

Medical professionals, such as Hill, have said the drugs are not experimental.

“We’ve never had to navigate a space in which adults seeking care who are informed of the care and informed of all the possible side effects are now being told that the government has decided to say whether they can actually engage in that care,” Hill said.

Asked what the public policy goal is of restricting adults’ access to gender-affirming care when much of the discussion in Missouri and elsewhere has revolved around minors, Bailey said he “wanted all patients to have access to the information necessary to make health decisions that can have long-term deleterious health consequences.”

“But at the end of the day that started with protecting children,” Bailey said.

One aspect of the rule stipulates that providers cannot give gender-affirming care if they don’t “ensure that any psychiatric symptoms from existing mental health comorbidities of the patient have been treated and resolved.”

Bailey said that means “treating these other mental health problems before we raced down the road of administration of experimental drugs.”

“Mental health comorbidity is a recognized medical term so that the providers know how to apply those terms,” Bailey said. “And certainly, they’ve done this before in other contexts. So this is not groundbreaking in the sense that we’re quantifying the need to put some safeguards in place to make sure that patients have access to mental health services and information.”

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