TWIBS: Missouri Lawmakers Hate Missourians
Departing sharply from Maine’s support of trans people, Missouri’s state congress is making moves to harm trans people and pregnant people!
Humor by Alyssa Steinsiek
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s oldest column! Every Friday, Alyssa Steinsiek digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
Folks, I’ve got a twofer for you this week. It’s a diabolical twofer… a nefarious twofer… a twofer of pure evil, some might say. I know we got some seriously bad news this week already, but I already hit you with some genuinely positive news on Wednesday, so today I’d like to highlight some egregiously bad news (cartoonishly bad, even) to point out that our enemies are not simply mean, but actively evil. Like, the classical JRR Tolkien good-and-evil kind of evil. The sort of evil that makes you suspect the chief architect of this news must be some over the top villain named Vileous Stinkmeister, or maybe Chumpo Scumsworth.
I don’t know. You get the idea.
So Missouri, long renowned as the indisputable location of the biblical Garden of Eden, is seeking to establish a new reputation as the grossest place in America by simultaneously enshrining temporary transphobic law into the state constitution and also repeal state citizens’ right to abortion, as reported by St. Louis Public Radio. Which is sort of an unbelievably cruel double whammy, right?
If you don’t recall, there was a lot of transphobic nonsense happening in Missouri in 2023. After Jamie Reed lied about a gender clinic in St. Louis and was inexplicably propelled to minor celebrity status, she and Attorney General Andrew Bailey worked hand-in-hand to produce an affidavit (the veracity of which is questionable at best) that would be used to justify temporary restrictions on gender-affirming care for transgender youth, making access to care all but impossible. Those restrictions were lifted after just a month when the Missouri state legislature made access to care completely impossible.
Importantly, a sunset clause in the bill would cause it to expire in 2027 unless it was renewed or the Missouri state constitution was permanently amended to include the bill’s provisions… which, of course, conservative lawmakers would absolutely love to do.
Not satisfied with simply crushing transgender children, though, those lawmakers have included in the ballot initiative a referendum that would repeal Amendment 3, a hard won victory that guaranteed Missourians a constitutional right to reproductive freedom in November of last year. This isn’t exactly surprising, both because conservatives are by and large despicable ghouls, but also because they threatened to try to repeal Amendment 3 the very day it passed.
The ballot initiative uses deceptive language to describe banning GAC for minors, asking voters if they want to “protect minors from gender transition,” while the bill explicitly states that “no gender transition surgeries shall be knowingly performed on children under 18 years of age, and no cross-sex hormones or puberty-blocking drugs shall be knowingly prescribed or administered for the purpose of gender transition to children under 18 years of age.”
Cisgender children prescribed hormone therapy medications for issues such as precocious puberty are, of course, fine. Because it’s only when the transgender children access these medicines that evil must be done.
The marrying of prohibition on GAC and repealing of abortion rights is, undeniably, an attempt to push fence sitters into agreeing to a measure they might not typically approve of. Amendment 3 won by the narrowest of margins, and ensuring that those who oppose these life-saving treatments for trans kids must also tacitly bless an abortion ban is transparent political maneuvering of the nastiest kind.
The vote will take place in November next year, unless Governor Mike Kehoe calls for a special legislative session to address the issue before then. Regardless of when the vote takes place, let’s hope decent Missourians can unite to ensure that trans kids can get access to the healthcare they need and deserve, and that reproductive freedom stays put in Missouri’s state constitution.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a trans woman journalist who reports on news relevant to the queer community and occasionally posts on BlueSky.
