Last week, a Missouri Circuit Court judge upheld the state’s Save Adolescents From Experimentation (SAFE) Act, which is the first time a trial court has ruled to sustain a law banning puberty blockers, hormones and irreversible mutilating surgeries for children.
While several U.S. district courts have moved to block similar laws in five other states citing sex discrimination, the judge took notice of three recent appeals courts which have overturned these lower court decisions. The judge similarly ruled that questionable medical interventions are not a “right,” and in light of the medical community’s “total lack of consensus” in treating gender confusion, he noted it is not the Court’s role to “override the legislated will of the people.”
The ruling comes as the U.S. Supreme Court will hear an appeal challenging Tennessee’s law this week on December 4. A decision is expected by June 2025 which could determine whether all such state laws in the nation can be enforced.
During a nine-day bench trial, Judge R. Craig Carter of the Circuit Court of Cole County, Missouri heard a challenge from a coalition of “health care providers,” activists, and three Missouri families of gender-confused children who sued the state. The ACLU argued for these challengers claiming that the SAFE Act violates parental autonomy and the “fundamental right” of parents to seek these medical procedures. However, Missouri advised Judge Carter to consider the Cass Report, which has increased international skepticism of these procedures by revealing “remarkably weak evidence” that they lead to “positive outcomes.” Judge Carter also considered the World Professional Association for Transgender Health files, which show that these procedures are not based on medical science but by politics. In addition, he heard witness testimony from Chloe Cole, a woman who regrets having her breasts removed at the age of 15, and Jamie Reed, who testified about the Washington University Pediatric Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital which lied to parents and harmed hundreds of children with puberty blockers and mutilating surgeries.
After reviewing the evidence and testimonies, Judge Carter noted that “gender transition” does not actually change a person’s sex and that the medical industry had entered an “ethical minefield” in need of regulation.
“The evidence from trial showed that the medical ethics of gender dysphoria treatment for children and adolescents are entirely unsettled,” wrote Judge Carter. “Nonetheless, gender clinics discuss and request payment for these drugs and surgeries as if they do wholly change sex. Worse, patients and families might expect a full sex change. The adolescent’s body is permanently, but not fully, changed.”
Judge Carter was persuaded that the state needed to step in and protect children from the medical industry citing “credible evidence” admitted at trial showing that gender confusion “resolves itself over time” in 80-95 percent of adolescent patients.
“Essentially, it seems that all of this untested, non-emergency, possibly unethical, possibly unnecessary 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,” wrote Judge Carter. “Regarding the ethics of adolescent gender-affirming treatment, it would seem that the medical profession stands in the middle of an ethical minefield, with scant evidence to lead it out.”
Therefore, Judge Carter stated, “States do have abiding interest in protecting the integrity and ethics of the medical profession.”
Judge Carter then rejected the notion there is a Due Process right to medical interventions that a legislature has deemed unfit.
“Consider how strange it would be to conclude that there is a substantive due process right to obtain an intervention that the legislature has taken off the table. It would mean that legislatures could never regulate any drug or medical procedure,” wrote Judge Carter. “Any person—including a minor—would be able to obtain anything from meth, to ecstasy to abortion so long as a single medical professional were willing to recommend it.”
Judge Carter noted the Appeals Court rulings from the Sixth, Seventh, and Eleventh Circuits that upheld similar laws protecting children in Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee. He concurred with these rulings that federal courts have “a limited role” and “do not mediate medical debates.”
This judicial ruling may be the last until the Supreme Court rules in U.S. v. Skrmetti, where the Biden-Harris Department of Justice seeks to set a precedent to keep these harmful procedures available for children.
Missouri’s (SAFE) Act prohibits health care providers from prescribing puberty blockers, hormones, or performing medically mutilating surgeries for minors. The law also gives patients a 15-year window after any procedure, or 15 years after their 21st birthday, whichever is later, to file a civil lawsuit against their medical provider.
Liberty Counsel’s Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “There is no fundamental right to subject children to dangerous drugs and irreversible, experimental surgeries. However, talk therapy is a free speech right protected by the First Amendment, and allows a counselor to help a client who struggles with unwanted desires, behaviors, or gender confusion. The Missouri Circuit Court has rightly ruled that the state is free to protect children from the harmful interventions of gender ideology that has devastated many lives.”
For more information about state laws protecting children from gender ideology, visit Liberty Counsel’s website here.
