ST. LOUIS, Missouri (LifeSiteNews) — Physicians at Washington University’s Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital are ceasing to dole out harmful puberty blockers and sterilizing cross-sex hormones after the state’s Republican governor signed a bill banning the drugs for children.
In a Monday statement, the university said it was “disheartened to have to take this step” but announced that its doctors “will no longer prescribe puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones to minors for purposes of gender transition” due to “Missouri’s newly enacted law regarding transgender care [sic].”
SB 49, also known as the “Missouri Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act,” was signed into law June 7 by Republican Gov. Mike Parson. The law effectively prohibits all medical intervention for gender-confused minors – including puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries – and bans the use of state funds to support so-called “gender transitions” and taxpayer-funded “transitions” in state prisons.
“We support everyone’s right to his or her own pursuit of happiness; however, we must protect children from making life-altering decisions that they could come to regret in adulthood once they have physically and emotionally matured,” Gov. Parson said.
The measure took effect August 28.
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The St. Louis clinic said the law has made “it untenable for us to continue to provide” transgender drugs and treatments to children “without subjecting the university and our providers to an unacceptable level of liability.”
Minors who have been receiving the drugs from the clinic “will be referred to other providers for these services,” while the St. Louis transgender center will continue offering “education and mental health support” as well as transgender interventions to people ages 18 and up.
The Missouri law banning transgender interventions for children comes after Jamie Reed, 42, a former caseworker at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, said she left her job in November because she could no longer support what the center was doing to gender-confused minors.
The whistleblower, who signed a sworn affidavit affirming her claims, spoke out forcefully against the “morally and medically appalling” interventions that cause permanent physical and psychological damage to children, most of them girls.
Based on her experiences and her convictions, Reed called for “a moratorium on the hormonal and surgical treatment of young people with gender dysphoria.”
READ: Former transgender clinic employee blows whistle on ‘appalling’ mutilation of children
As LifeSiteNews has reported, in addition to asserting a false reality that one’s sex can be changed, transgender surgeries and drugs have been linked to permanent physical and psychological damage, including cardiovascular diseases, loss of bone density, cancer, strokes and blood clots, infertility, and suicidality. Further, studies indicate that over 80 percent of children suffering from gender dysphoria will outgrow it on their own by late adolescence without surgical or pharmaceutical interventions.
Regardless, transgender identification among children has spiked in recent years and the rates of surgical mutilation for minors have risen astronomically. The phenomenon has coincided with young children across the country being actively encouraged in their classrooms to adopt “transgender,” “gender-fluid,” or “non-binary” identities.
The promotion of gender ideology for children has triggered backlash from parents and conservative lawmakers, who have worked at the grassroots and legislative levels to craft legislation to ban destructive drugs and surgeries for minors, require schools to notify families of a child’s gender confusion, pull sexually explicit and pro-LGBT curricula and materials from classrooms and school libraries, protect girls’ sports and spaces, and ban sexualized performances targeting children.
And while Republican-led states like Missouri have passed laws banning destructive drugs and surgeries for children, some Democrat-led states have moved in the opposite direction. In Maine, the governor recently signed a law permitting cross-sex hormones for children even without parental consent.