A judge is expected to rule soon in a hearing that will determine if Senate Bill 49, Missouri’s law banning minors from receiving gender-affirming health care in the state, will take effect as scheduled on Monday.
The hearing continued in Greene County court in Springfield on Wednesday.
One person who took the stand is 19-year-old Chloe Cole who began transitioning from female to male when she was 15 after deciding at age 12 that she didn’t want to be a girl. She later changed her mind.
“To make a decision like this it requires a lot of maturity, a lot of experience and years of living in the world that children just lack,” she said.
Vernadette Broyles, attorney and president and general counsel for the Child and Parental Rights Campaign, said there's not sufficient evidence to support what she called gender transition interventions in children who are still developing.
"To interfere with their healthy genetically established growth and development — and even the brain development — is, in my mind, a human rights violation," she said.
But Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, counsel with Lambda Legal, believes the law will lead to long-lasting harm for trans youth and for trans adult Medicaid beneficiaries who would no longer have health care coverage.
“And more importantly, we saw no justification for this ban other than we don’t want people to be trans,” he said.
Gonzalez-Pagan said he believes that if the law is allowed to go into effect, residents and healthcare providers — including child and adolescent psychiatrists — will leave Missouri.
"It's going to harm not just trans youth and their families who will be irreparably and gravely harmed, but it will harm all Missourians by losing providers that would have helped all of youth in the State of Missouri," he said.
Last month, lawyers representing three families of transgender minors, two LGBTQ+ organizations – including Lambda Legal -- and doctors sued to overturn the law. They asked a county judge to temporarily block the law until the court challenge is decided.
