A handful of Republicans running for Missouri’s top offices received crucial support from the former president Donald Trump ahead of Tuesday’s primary — a boost for candidates who have all pledged to further restrict LGBTQ+ rights in the deep-red state.
Missouri has already passed several anti-trans laws, including a ban on trans youth playing on sports teams that align with their gender identity and a ban on gender-affirming care for minors, inmates and residents enrolled in the state’s Medicaid program.
But the front-runners in the race for governor and attorney general could push for even tougher anti-transgender measures if they win in November.
Trump, the Republican presidential candidate, praised three candidates for governor: Sen. Bill Eigel, Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft and lieutenant governor. Mike Kehoe.
“They are all for MAGA and America First,” he wrote on Truth Social, a conservative social media platform largely owned by the former president.
A few days later, Trump endorsed both GOP candidates for attorney general: incumbent Attorney General Andrew Bailey and Will Scharf, a lawyer who helped secure a ruling giving Trump immunity of criminal prosecution.
Missouri has not elected a Democratic attorney general or governor since 2004. 2017and Trump won the Show Me State with over 56% of the vote in both the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.
The candidates Trump endorsed each have long records of supporting anti-LGBTQ+ legislation, sharing misleading anti-trans rhetoric, and targeting transgender youth. Here’s a look at what’s at stake if any of these candidates takes office.
The race for attorney general
Bailey, who has received the support of Missouri’s two Republican senators, Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt, the National Rifle Association and several law enforcement unions in the state, is the state’s highest-profile advocate for anti-transgender policies.
In April 2023, as the Missouri Legislature was debating a ban on gender-affirming care for youth, Bailey signed an emergency measure that imposed vague and overly broad requirements on both trans youth and adults seeking such care.
Under his order, patients had to meet a onerous list of requirements, including undergoing 18 months of therapy to prove that prior mental health issues had been resolved. At the same time, the rule required patients to be screened for autism and to have three years of medical documentation of gender dysphoria, and it forced health care providers to prove that a patient was not experiencing “social contagion.” (The “social contagion” theory that adolescents, particularly those assigned female at birth, are influenced by their peers to identify as transgender has been refuted in numerousscientificto research.)
The rule was heavily criticized by advocates and medical professionals, who saw it as an overreach into Missouri’s consumer protection law.
Adult transgender people from Missouri at the time said The rule had immediate consequences: some doctors told their patients they could no longer return their hormone prescriptions.
Bailey lifted the emergency declaration after the Republican Legislature passed a ban that applied to juveniles, Medicaid recipients and prisoners.
Bailey is also one of several Republican attorneys general across the country who have launched investigations into hospitals and clinics that provide gender-affirming care to transgender youth.
In January 2023 he is launched a study at the Washington University Pediatric Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital.
This came after Jamie Reed, a former social worker, accused the center of rushing minors to undergo medical procedures, administering medications without parental consent, and harming children. Based on these allegations, Bailey asked the hospital for patient medical records and a list of patients who had received care there. He later sought information about therapists and social workers across the state who worked with transgender youth.
A Missouri judge ruled that Bailey’s office no right to personal medical information.
Bailey is mentioned in a report by the U.S. Senate Finance Committee on four attorneys general who abused their regulatory and consumer protection powers to target trans youth and adults and obtain personal medical records.
Throughout his tenure, Bailey has opposed a series of issues surrounding the “culture war”including expressing concern about the Biden administration’s new Title IX guidelines, which provide protections for trans students, and supporting universities’ efforts to eliminate discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
Bailey’s actions have “created a hostile environment for medical providers, where they are afraid to stay and practice medicine.” said Katy Erker-Lynch, executive director of PROMO, an LGBTQ advocacy organization in Missouri.
Scharf, the other Republican running for Missouri attorney general, hasn’t had the same opportunities to develop anti-trans policies in the state, but his positions on LGBTQ+ issues appear to be much the same as Bailey’s, according to reporting from the NPR affiliate KCURScharf supports the ban on gender-affirming care for minors and the ban on trans athletes participating in women’s sports.
Scharf applauded Bailey’s emergency order last year, saying Breitbart at a time when “we are winning on this issue” and criticized the left for being “increasingly violent.”
Scharf has also criticized the way Bailey has run his office, accusing the current attorney general of inserting himself “very clumsily” into hot-button issues without doing thorough investigations. Scharf has sold himself as a MAGA loyalist. He played a big roll in the U.S. Supreme Court case that granted presidents immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts performed in office.
The lawyer is funded by a large network of traditional conservatives who have worked with Trump, including megadonor Leonard Leo, the chairman of The Federalist Society who played a key role in reshaping the Supreme Court to include a far-right conservative majority. The Concord Fund, a shadowy nonprofit that has funneled millions into Republican attorney general races in the past and has deep ties to Leo, gave at least $3.5 million to two pro-Scharf PACs.
The Republican winner of Tuesday’s primary will face Democrat Elad Gross, who has heavily criticized Bailey and other Republicans for their laser focus on rolling back transgender rights in the state. If elected, Gross is proposing to create the state’s first civil rights division in the attorney general’s office, which would help protect LGBTQ+ residents from discrimination, according to his campaign website.
The governor’s race
The three Trump-backed front-runners in the nine-candidate Republican gubernatorial race have all taken varying degrees of anti-transgender stances.
Eigel, a state senator, has compared “transgender ideology” to “child abuse” and said he believes gender-affirming surgery is “harmful” to people of all ages. He has suggested that it may eventually be necessary to extend a ban similar to Bailey’s emergency measure to all adults seeking care.
Eigel also wrote in a Facebook post that if elected, he would call the police and arrest all “woke liberals” who bring “transgender drag queens” into elementary schools on the grounds of “child abuse,” echoing the sentiments of many Republicans. rhetoric who wrongly tries to link LGBTQ+ to pedophilia.
The other candidates for governor are: less blatant. Kehoe, the lieutenant governor, has supported the ban on transitional care for minors and the ban on sports, but he also voted in favor add In 2013, anti-discrimination measures were incorporated into state law. Ashcroft, Missouri’s current secretary of state, also supported legislation to limit care, but he disagreed with Bailey’s emergency measure, saying it negatively impacted adults seeking care.
“I don’t think people should do that,” Kehoe said St. Louis Public Radioabout gender-affirming care, “but there’s a difference between what I think and where I think the government should be involved. If you’re an adult and you want to spend your own money, I don’t agree with that, but it’s not my place to tell you you can’t.”
Several candidates compete to become the nominee in what the first significant primary battle among Democrats in the race for Missouri governor since 2004. Many of these candidates have indicated that they see reproductive health care as an important issue to entice voters, and Missourians are about to abortion rights on the ballot through an amendment to the state constitution in November.
