The Missouri Senate recently passed a pair of bills that take aim at transgender youth — SB 49 and 39. Respectively, they ban gender affirming therapies and surgeries for minors, and make it a requirement for transgender athletes to play on the sports team that aligns with the gender they were assigned at birth.
The bills are still awaiting house approval, but in the meantime, transgender advocates and allies are protesting and advocating in Jefferson City as much as they can. Rabbi Daniel Bogard from the Central Reform Congregation is one of the people heading down to the Capitol on Wednesday afternoon for a protest. He’ll be there for the second day in a row, after he had an “awful” meeting with the Speaker of the House on Tuesday.
“It was the worst day I've ever had in Jeff City. It was a total lack of respect,” Bogard said on Total Information AM. “So many of these politicians know that what they're doing is wrong. They know that the way that they are targeting trans kids and billing some of the most vulnerable children and families in this state is wrong. But they're doing it because they think it's good politics.”
One of those legislators is State Senator Bill Eigel, who recently said that he supports parents of transgender kids leaving the state. “If someone is disappointed in Missouri because they can’t harm kids here, we are better if they are gone,” he said recently.
Bogard said that kind of rhetoric is dangerous.
“That should chill the spine of any of our listeners who have any experience with history and looking at the very dark paths that rhetoric like that leads down again and again and again,” he said.
Quotes like those from Eigel keep Bogard up at night. Plus, he adds that the things Republican legislators say about gender-affirming care are misconstrued.
“The ways that they distort and pervert the reality of what gender affirming care is disgusting. And it's reprehensible. And they do it again and again,” Bogard said. “Because they think it's good politics for them to torture the, you know, 2,500 trans kids in the state of Missouri or something like that.”
While lots of Republicans decry gender affirming care as “mutilation,” Bogard explained that for his nine-year-old son, gender affirming care isn’t hormones or surgery — it’s a haircut and clothing. As for health care, he doesn’t know what the future holds for his son. Right now, he just wants the government to stay out of his home, and his pediatrician’s office — things he says he used to think of as conservative values.
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Bogard has been making his way down to the Capitol for a long time, and sometimes he brings his son for lobby days “to see my kid as human," he said. But lately, on testimony days, his son stays home.
“We try to protect him from this as much as we can. It's scary and he gets scared sometimes,” he said. “We don’t let him go to testimony days in Jeff City, because the legislators ask awful questions. I'm talking about sitting senators who ask children what their genitals look like, right — children. Like that should set off alarm bells for all of us, when that is the focus of our senators.”
Bogard said that for a while, when he and other parents went to Jefferson City, they thought they were making some headway and changing opinions. But now, it’s different.
“All of a sudden these Republican legislators won't even look me in the eye. They can't look me in the eye,” he said. “And it's the sense that they know that they are hurting us, that they're hurting our kids, that they're hurting our families, that we are scared because of them because of our government coming after us. And they can't bear to look at us anymore.”
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