Thus far I’ve avoided writing anything substantial on trans issues, and I intend to mostly stick to that policy. I’m a man who has never experienced gender dysphoria and has no experience with struggling to conform to gender expectations, so any effort I make to address the realities of that experience and how policy can impact trans people will be necessarily off the mark. And with no background in genetics, biology, or other relevant fields, I dare not even guess at how biology intersects with sociology on these points. But there is a bare minimum level of freedom for trans people that can easily be agreed to by anyone of a liberal persuasion, even if they outright dismiss most of the assertions of trans people and gender theories, and this bare minimum is a level that is being brushed aside as we speak, particularly in the State of Missouri, a story Erin Reed covered early.
The order applies to any kind of gender surgery or hormone therapy to gender transition or reduce gender dysphoria, and applies to both adults and minors (with a few special provisions specifically for minors). Attorney General Andrew Bailey, who has no apparent training in medicine, issued an emergency order deeming such treatments to be “unfair, deceptive, fraudulent, or otherwise unlawful” to unless the treatment providing meets a host of requirements, perhaps most egregiously requiring that “any psychiatric symptoms from existing mental health comorbidities of the patient have been treated and resolved”, while also requiring three years documented dysphoria, 15 hours of consultations, and a comprehensive test for autism, followed by yearly follow-ups.
All of this is justified not be the defense of some other person - after all, it applies to adults who are choosing to receive treatment at gender clinics. This is nearly impossible to reconcile with John Stuart Mill’s famous maxim from On Liberty - “Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign”. Clearly individuals are choosing to acquire and be treated with hormones or other kinds of gender therapy; to rule ‘unlawful’ the process of medically assisting them in so doing clearly strikes close to the absolute sovereignty of the individual over their body.
Interestingly, Bailey has made another ‘fundamental right’ - that to bear arms - a major part of his political career. But even laying aside the question of firearms being used against others, it is difficult to reconcile these two positions even simply from the perspective of looking at the state’s right, or lack thereof, to protect us from ourselves.
In theory the Attorney General claims to be protecting individuals from fraudulent claims about medical care at gender clinics, arguing that these clinics may offer an unrealistic solution to people who in fact need a different course of treatment. And there may be some number of individuals who have indeed misjudged their own gender therapy needs and have been ill served by their treatment - this is true of many kinds of surgeries, of course. But the scale pales in comparison to the number of Americans who kill themselves with firearms - a number surpassing twenty thousand a year. Nonetheless, companies selling handguns can offer them as a solution for home defense, with the claim that they will make the owner of the firearm safer.
Certainly some of the same requirements Baily has put on gender clinics could save many more lives if applied to firearms - imagine if a firearms dealer had to ensure that their customers had 15 hours of psychiatric evaluation before purchasing a weapon, or that all their mental health issues were resolved. Surely yearly checkups on gun owners to ensure their guns had not created any adverse side effects, and that the gun owners could still safely be entrusted to own them, would catch many individuals before they could harm themselves.
But Bailey would doubtless argue that this is above and beyond the responsibility of the company simply providing the tools. Each individual has the responsibility to make wise decisions with them. He might even quote LT Hobhouse, that '“Compulsion may be necessary for the purposes of external order, but it adds nothing to the inward life that is the true being of man. It even threatens it with loss of authority and infringes the sphere of its responsibility”; that infringing so deeply on an individual's privacy and self determination could not be justified simply by looking out for the individual themselves.
The same must apply with much greater force to gender therapy. Doctors and individuals need to be able to sort out the appropriate course of action for themselves. This may not always look how Bailey, or anyone else, wants it to look. Indeed, there may even be mistakes made; to complete the quotation from Hobhouse:
Under self-guidance individuals will diverge widely, and some of their eccentricities will be futile, others wasteful, others even painful and abhorrent to witness. But, upon the whole, it is good that they should differ. Individuality is an element of well-being, and that not only because it is the necessary consequence of self-government, but because, after all allowances for waste, the common life is fuller and richer for the multiplicity of types that it includes, and that go to enlarge the area of collective experience.
Even if we take Bailey at his word, that his restrictions on gender therapy for adults are merely attempting to use his authority to enforce medical best practices, he has gone beyond the rightful bounds of state power. In a manner where individuals are defining their own bodies and identities, the state must err on the side of defending this individual freedom, even if some agents of the state don’t like what they see in all cases. In these cases, they must yield their authority as servants of the state to the sovereignty of the individual.