JEFFERSON CITY (LifeSiteNews) — Missouri Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey has filed suit against one of the state’s last remaining health centers to continue administering puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones to gender-confused minors without comprehensive mental health reviews, as legally required prior to a newly-enforceable law that bans “transitioning” with or without review.
On September 24, Bailey’s office announced a suit against “Southampton Community Healthcare, Inc., for providing gender transition interventions, such as puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones, to minors without a comprehensive mental health assessment” as required by the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act. “This suit comes after Attorney General Bailey’s legal team obtained concessions in open court that providers did not even meet diluted medical standards before allowing children to undergo gender transition procedures.”
The suit is seeking “full restitution” to all individuals “transitioned” by the clinic without such an assessment, a $1,000 civil penalty against the clinic per violation, and an injunction against repeating the offenses in the future.
“As long as I’m Attorney General, I will fight to ensure that Missouri is the safest state in the nation for children,” said Bailey, who is also leading a multi-state coalition in support of an Arkansas ban on “transitioning” minors. “These providers failed Missouri’s children when they rejected even a diluted medical standard and subjected them to irreversible procedures. My office is not standing for it.”
“Southampton Community Health Care could not immediately be reached for comment,” NPR reported September 25.
The lawsuit’s attempt to penalize Southampton is in addition to Missouri’s recently-upheld law against “transitioning” minors with or without health reviews. Signed into law on June 7, the Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act effectively prohibits all medical intervention for gender-confused minors – including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries – as well as banning the use of state funds to support so-called “gender transitions” and taxpayer-funded “transitions” in state prisons.
It makes exceptions only for interventions already begun prior to the end of August, “medically verifiable disorders of sex development,” treating conditions caused or exacerbated by previous “transition” attempts, or procedures necessary to prevent “imminent danger of death or impairment of a major bodily function.”
The law was challenged in court but upheld last month by Circuit Court Judge Steven Ohmer, prompting Washington University’s Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital to cease dispensing the drugs.
Evidence shows that “affirming” gender confusion carries serious harms, especially when done with impressionable children who lack the mental development, emotional maturity, and life experience to consider the long-term ramifications of the decisions being pushed on them or full knowledge about the long-term effects of life-altering, physically-transformative, and often-irreversible surgical and chemical procedures.
Studies find that more than 80% of children experiencing gender dysphoria outgrow it on their own by late adolescence, and that even full “reassignment” surgery often fails to resolve gender-confused individuals’ heightened tendency to engage in self-harm and suicide — and may even exacerbate it, including by reinforcing their confusion and neglecting the actual root causes of their mental strife.
Many oft-ignored “detransitioners,” individuals who attempted to live under a different “gender identity” before embracing their sex, attest to the physical and mental harm of reinforcing gender confusion, as well as to the bias and negligence of the medical establishment on the subject, many of whom take an activist approach to their profession and begin cases with a predetermined conclusion that “transitioning” is the best solution.
Some such physicians have also been caught on video admitting to more old-fashioned motives for such procedures, as with an exposé last year about Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s Clinic for Transgender Health, where Dr. Shayne Sebold Taylor said outright that “these surgeries make a lot of money.”