Andrew Bailey is Proud of Misleading the Public and Terrorizing Trans Kids
The Missouri Attorney General wrote an op-ed proudly distorting the science in a victory lap for ignorance and hate.
by Evan Urquhart
Attorney General Andrew Bailey today published an op-ed crowing about his successful persecution of trans youth and their families for the Southeast Missourian with a now-familiar mix of lies, half-truths, fear-mongering, and unctuousness. Bailey is clearly very proud of how he’s led the charge in terrorizing innocent families, forcing them to flee to protect the safety and health of their children.
The AG’s op-ed relies heavily on a common anti-trans disinformation technique, specifically using a technical classification for observational studies to imply there’s something wrong with them. “Low-quality” and “high risk of bias” are used in evidence reviews to characterize any study that isn’t a randomized controlled trial, but Bailey portrays this as a gotcha that somehow undermines the overall evidence base.
screenshot from the Southeast Missourian
A statement by USPATH in 2022 addressed this insinuation that low-quality means there was something wrong with the research, writing “It is important to clarify that a statement of “low quality evidence” means neither “poor quality research” nor “evidence of harm” … There are many areas of medicine where commonly prescribed treatment recommendations are made based on “low quality” evidence due to similar practical limitations, for example the use of antidepressants during pregnancy.”
What “low quality” and “high risk of bias” mean in this technical context is that there haven’t been randomized controlled trials of puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones. RCTs are when a drug is tested against a placebo, and they provide very high quality evidence for the effectiveness of the drug. However, there are situations where controlled trials are very difficult or impossible: RCTs on surgical procedures are one large area of medicine where this is so.
In the case of gender-affirming care, many of the potential problems with RCTs are obvious. Patients can’t be blinded to which intervention they’re receiving because they’ll quickly realize if their puberty isn’t being blocked or they’re not seeing the effects of cross-sex hormones. In addition, it’s difficult to get patients to consent to trials where they’ll either get a known treatment with decades of clinical experience behind it or nothing, which is the case with gender-affirming care.
Bailey hits many other greatest hits of anti-trans propaganda in the op-ed as well. He rattles off a familiar list of other countries that have supposedly restricted treatment and includes Norway, a country that hasn’t restricted care at all, according to the Associated Press. And, he misleadingly presents the total ban on puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones in Missouri as being similar to a decision in Sweden to restrict these interventions to young people who have had gender incongruence since young childhood or those who participate in research studies.
Lastly, of course, Bailey discusses the experiences of political detransitioners. Not, apparently, having found any native detransitioners who fit the narrative he mentions Chloe Cole, one of fewer than ten activists who have traveled the country sharing their experiences and counter the numerous local youth and young adults who have benefitted from treatment and oppose the bans. Cole, according to Bailey, claims she bleeds every day from her top surgery four years ago.
Bailey thinks nothing of presenting this sort of bizarre, unverified claim alongside his insistence that the existing peer-reviewed evidence base for an established treatment isn’t based in science. However there’s an interesting omission in his op-ed. Bailey mentions the allegations of Jamie Reed only once, and not by name. It seems, perhaps, that the weaknesses of those allegations are so glaring that even Andrew Bailey isn’t willing to diminish his reputation by repeating them as if they were true.
