Missouri’s Republican attorney general is seeking to implement an emergency regulation to restrict gender-affirming care for minors.
“Because gender transition interventions are experimental, the regulation clarifies that state law already prohibits performing experimental procedures in the absence of specific guardrails,” Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey said in a news release on Monday.
Some of the “guardrails” include “prohibiting gender transition interventions when the provider fails to ensure that the patient has received a full psychological or psychiatric assessment, consisting of not fewer than 15 separate, hourly sessions over the course of not fewer than 18 months to determine, among other things, whether the person has any mental health comorbidities,” according to the release.
The rule will go into effect 10 days after it is filed with Missouri’s secretary of state office, which said it had not yet been filed as of late Tuesday morning.
Once it goes into effect, the regulation would last “30 legislative days or 180 days, whichever is longer,” the release said.
Republicans have expressed concern over long-term outcomes and question whether minors are capable of making such consequential decisions. LGBTQ advocates and many physicians, however, regard the treatment as medically necessary, evidence-based care that uses a multidisciplinary approach to help a person transition from their assigned gender – the one the person was designated at birth – to their affirmed gender, the gender by which one wants to be known.
Major medical associations agree that gender-affirming care is clinically appropriate for children and adults with gender dysphoria, which, according to the American Psychiatric Association, is psychological distress that may result when a person’s gender identity and sex assigned at…
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