“It's Unhealthy to Deny the Objective Reality of the Law of Gravity”
Missouri AG Andrew Bailey explained his opposition to transgender rights in terms that would also support an objection to birds, planes, rockets, and hot-air ballons.
by Evan Urquhart
The Attorney General of Missouri announced earlier this week that he’s seeking to unilaterally impose emergency restrictions on the medical treatments involved in gender-affrming care for youth. What’s really behind Andrew Bailey’s oppositition to healthcare for trans youth? Is it the “experimental” nature of drugs which were approved by the FDA decades ago? Is it the medical evidence, which every major medical association in the country agrees supports the provision of treatments that ease the strain on youth suffering from gender dysphoria? Or is it a laughably shallow belief in natural law, that could just as easily be used justify an opposition to any medical treatment, or any human technological advances of any kind?
According to Bailey himself, it’s the latter. That’s the upshot of his remarks as reported by the Washington Examiner, where he stated that he believes gender dysphoria should be treated as a mental health problem, not a medical one… because man was not meant to fly?
screenshot from te Washington Examiner
Bailey himself is a lawyer, not a doctor, so when he says it’s “unhealthy” to deny objective reality he’s not referring to any medical or objective measure of health. What the attorney general is really describing is known as the naturalistic fallacy, the belief that something that is natural must also be good. It’s a fallacy not because natural things can’t be good, but because inevitably humans who rely on a simplistic framework of natural=good are picking and choosing which natural things they think are good and which things it’s totally fine for humans to use our technology to improve on.
All of modern medicine, not to mention the rest of human technology, is built on defying what is natural in some sense. Just as AG Bailey could use a hot-air balloon to overcome the natural limitations of gravity, or a child with strep-throat could use antibiotics to overcome the natural limitations of illness, so can a gender dysphoric patient use hormone therapy to overcome the natural limitations of sex. The obvious next question would be why Bailey thinks that a hot-air balloonist’s defiance of the law of gravity is acceptable, but the defiance of nature involved in gender-affirming care is not.