Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey speaks Jan. 20, 2023, to the Missouri chapter of the Federalist Society on the Missouri House of Representatives dais (Annelise Hanshaw/Missouri Independent).

In 2015, Robert Dear shot three people to death and injured nine others at a Colorado Planned Parenthood. When he was arrested after a five hour stand-off he told police: “no more baby parts.” 

The gunman was repeating a lie that presidential candidates and politicians had taken mainstream after an anti-abortion group released doctored videos of Planned Parenthood employees discussing the donation of fetal tissue for medical research. 

Numerous state and congressional committees found Planned Parenthood did nothing wrong, but the damage was done. The organization lost funding to provide contraception in a number of states, potentially lifesaving medical research was halted, doctors were defamed and threatened, and three people lost their lives.

When “selling baby parts” first went viral, it seemed inevitable to me that someone was going to get hurt.

That fear hit me once again when I heard Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey refer to clinics providing care to transgender people as “a bloody scourge intended to defile innocents.” 

Bailey has said parents consenting to treatment for transgender children are engaged in “child abuse,” claimed Missouri has “a shadowy clandestine network” of clinics engaging in “science projects, experimentation on children masquerading as medicine.”

Bailey tweeted a Newmax article that praised him for stopping “concentration camp medicine on children” and accused St. Louis Children’s Hospital of “figuratively strip-mining emotionally damaged and immature children for the benefit of doctors and the hospital.” 

And Bailey has repeatedly engaged in the “baby parts” incitement of our day with allegations of “child mutilation.”

Missouri AG doesn’t want the public to know he’s pushing wild legal theories in abortion cases

You may not have heard this language from Bailey if you get your news from mainstream sources. That is because he largely saves this messaging for right-wing shows while lying to general audiences about his legal attacks on transgender care using a more moderate tone.

Bailey has promulgated an emergency rule restricting transgender care that he claims–in some forums–is not intended to deprive transgender people of medical care, but merely to implement “commonsense guidelines” and ensure “informed consent.” In a recent op-ed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for example, Bailey writes: “I introduced a regulation to ensure that patients are informed of the science and are guaranteed access to adequate mental health care, such as talk therapy.”  

Bailey’s rule does nothing to guarantee access to mental health care. What it does is impose arbitrary and burdensome requirements that would keep transgender people in the state from receiving medical care. This is an overregulation strategy pioneered by abortion opponents to deprive patients of abortion providers when Roe prohibited outright bans.  

Bailey wants to minimize what he is doing for the readers of the Post-Dispatch, but when he went on the anti-LGBTQ Family Research Center’s “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” he proudly accepted credit for having “issued emergency regulations this afternoon that, in effect, will end transgender intervention procedures for minors.” (Bailey often pretends his rule applies only to minors, but it plainly applies to transgender adults, as he and his spokesperson have admitted.) Similarly, when asked by Fox News “Why are you putting an end to these procedures in the state of Missouri?” Bailey did not dispute that this is in fact what he is attempting to do.

Bailey is also misleading the public about “the science,” but I will not dwell on that here both because that has been well-explained elsewhere and because I am not among the exploding population of armchair endocrinologists, expert in transgender medicine despite lacking any medical background or patient experience. 

Less discussed is how and why Bailey is misleading the public about his authority under Missouri law. Bailey’s attempt to use the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act to turn himself into a one-man legislature has made his oft-repeated slogan “enforcing the law as written” truly farcical. 

What Bailey admits is an “innovative approach” is not likely to fly in court, as even vociferously ant-trans Missouri Republicans like Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft and Sen. Mike Moon have acknowledged.

I expect Bailey knows his emergency rule will not likely survive court review as well.  

So why do it? Because a loss in court will not erase the many weeks he has enjoyed presenting himself as the defender of children “mutilated” by their evil parents and doctors, repeatedly congratulating himself on far-right shows for “leading the nation on these issues” and inviting other Attorneys General to emulate his “first in the nation” innovative lawlessness.

By the time a court explains to Bailey that he is Missouri’s Attorney General rather than its king, many people will have come to believe that a state attorney general has the power to single-handedly ban gender affirming or other care. And because what people think the law is can matter as much as what it actually is, this will embolden those who want to harm transgender people and exacerbate fear among transgender people that they can be stripped of their rights and healthcare at any time.  

Bailey doesn’t need his rule to ever go into effect in order to create fear and confusion that is useful to him. Transgender people and their families are already leaving the state.  

Bailey appears to believe animosity towards transgender people and their families and medical providers is useful to him politically, and a court loss is more likely to add gasoline to that fire than dampen it. 

But this is not a game.  

Missouri is a state awash in guns, where police believe they have no power in the absence of a red flag law to take weapons away from people known to be violent and unstable. A Missouri man who had marinated in right-wing vitriol for years just shot a Black teenager who mistakenly knocked on his door. 

Missourians need to hear our Attorney General’s villification of parents who “consent to permanent gender mutilation,” and the “woke left” that “does not care about the health and safety of people because they don’t value human lives” before the next Robert Dear does.

Shoddy lawyering is bad, but dehumanizing your fellow Missourians invites much worse.