Mississippi Today
Legislative committee releases report on UMMC’s LGBTQ+ clinic

A legislative committee on Friday released a report about an LGBTQ+ clinic at the University of Mississippi Medical Center that came under fire last year after lawmakers were angered to learn it had provided gender-affirming care to trans youth.
UMMC leadership ultimately decided the “Trustworthy, Evidence-based, Affirming, Multidisciplinary,” or TEAM, clinic should stop seeing trans kids last fall even though gender-affirming care for minors was legal at the time, according to emails obtained by Mississippi Today.
It wasn’t until earlier this year that lawmakers passed House Bill 1125, which banned the provision of gender-affirming care to trans minors in Mississippi.
The purpose of Friday’s brief published by the Joint Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review, or PEER, was to provide lawmakers with an overview of — and the sources of funding for — gender-affirming care at the TEAM clinic. The report also provides a summary of HB 1125.
It asks basic questions like “why did UMMC open the TEAM clinic,” “how does the TEAM clinic operate” and “what services are provided by the TEAM clinic?”
The answers paint a picture of a shoestring clinic without its own dedicated physical space that operated on private funds and was staffed by the goodwill of 18 employees who had other primary responsibilities at UMMC. The TEAM clinic, founded in 2015, sought to provide a slate of health services in an inclusive environment for LGBTQ+ Mississippians. That included primary care and more specialized services like mental health and gender-affirming care.
Despite conservative lawmakers and blogs claiming that state funding was paying “for mutilation of children,” the TEAM Clinic mainly ran on patient revenue and grant funding from three sources: The Women’s Foundation of Mississippi, the LGBTQ Fund of Mississippi and the Manning Family Fund.
The TEAM clinic did not provide surgery to patients under the age of 18. For adults, surgical referrals to UMMC’s Plastic Surgery Department were provided.
Most of the patient revenue that supported the clinic over a roughly three-year period beginning in fiscal year 2020 came from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Mississippi ($55,051) and other commercial insurances. The Mississippi Division of Medicaid paid out $24,122 in claims, according to the report, about 17% of the amount billed by UMMC for services at the TEAM clinic.
A very small portion of state funding — an estimated $1,215 in fiscal year 2022 — paid for the few hours that providers spent at the TEAM clinic on the first Friday of every month.
The miniscule amount of state funding is similar to what PEER discovered when it also sent inquiries to Mississippi Medicaid to determine how much the agency paid out in claims associated with gender identity disorder or gender dysphoria.
All told, it took approximately $25,000 a year to support the clinic’s operations, the PEER found.
The clinic saw less than 300 patients in the same three-year period, an estimate that might be “overinflated” due to the way UMMC maintained confidentiality in its patient count, the report found.
Just 221 people in that same period sought “gender transition services” at the TEAM Clinic, which the report appears to have counted as services ranging from “behavioral health” to prescriptions like puberty blockers and hormone therapy.
Over the three-year period, PEER estimated that just 53 patients under the age of 18 received gender transition services.
But the report says that “in FY 2024, the number of minors served in the Clinic should be zero.”
That number is due to HB 1125 but also to UMMC’s decision, made many months before the bill passed, to stop providing gender-affirming care like hormone therapy and puberty blockers to trans youth at the TEAM clinic. The PEER committee’s report may have been a factor in that decision.
The first inkling UMMC received of lawmakers’ interest in the clinic came on Aug. 31 when UMMC Vice Chancellor and Dean of the School of Medicine Dr. LouAnn Woodward was sent via hand mail a letter from the committee that was then forwarded to the TEAM clinic.
PEER’s letter requested “certain information regarding services provided by and payments provided to UMMC regarding gender transition services,” including how many services were provided to youth and adults and what amount had been subsidized by taxpayers or billed to Mississippi Medicaid.
Lawmakers had asked about the clinic in the past, but this time, PEER’s letter was followed by what Kristy Simms, UMMC’s point person with elected officials at the state and federal level, described as “dozens of inquiries,” according to emails obtained by Mississippi Today.
After Simms talked with lawmakers, emails show she proposed UMMC consider shutting down the clinic. She characterized her conversations with lawmakers, including Sam Mims, the chair of the House Public Health and Human Services Committee, as “hostile and slightly threatening.”
“It’s looking more and more like we have two options,” she wrote on Sept. 12. “Pause or shutter some/all of the work of the Center or be told to do so by the legislature in January.”
Staring in early October, the TEAM clinic began implementing leadership’s decision to stop providing gender-affirming care to trans kids, a move that impacted services across the hospital — and left parents and patients scrambling.
“Because it was such a welcoming environment, I couldn’t believe that they had just dropped patients like that,” Raymond Walker, a trans teenager who had sought care at the clinic, told Mississippi Today in April. “I was just completely blindsided.”
The emails also show UMMC leadership pondering if they should begin “dismantling” the TEAM in response to lawmakers’ inquiries.
The PEER report ends with a recommendation for a way UMMC could do that.
“UMMC could consider integrating services provided by the TEAM Clinic back into UMMC’s regular care setting, similar to the way it did with services provided to minors, and offer optional LGBTQ training courses to all staff and students,” the report says.
Now law, HB 1125 provides that any Mississippian, including doctors, can be held civilly liable for “conduct” that aids and abets the provision of gender-affirming care for trans youth, but advocates and attorneys have noted it’s unclear what that looks like.
UMMC has yet to answer that, but PEER notes the hospital’s attorneys are working to understand if its providers “will be allowed to refer patients to providers outside of the state, or if that would be considered aiding or abetting as provided in the law.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Early voting proposal killed on last day of Mississippi legislative session
Mississippi will remain one of only three states without no-excuse early voting or no-excuse absentee voting.
Senate leaders, on the last day of their regular 2025 session, decided not to send a bill to Gov. Tate Reeves that would have expanded pre-Election Day voting options. The governor has been vocally opposed to early voting in Mississippi, and would likely have vetoed the measure.
The House and Senate this week overwhelmingly voted for legislation that established a watered-down version of early voting. The proposal would have required voters to go to a circuit clerk’s office and verify their identity with a photo ID.
The proposal also listed broad excuses that would have allowed many voters an opportunity to cast early ballots.
The measure passed the House unanimously and the Senate approved it 42-7. However, Sen. Jeff Tate, a Republican from Meridian who strongly opposes early voting, held the bill on a procedural motion.
Senate Elections Chairman Jeremy England chose not to dispose of Tate’s motion on Thursday morning, the last day the Senate was in session. This killed the bill and prevented it from going to the governor.
England, a Republican from Vancleave, told reporters he decided to kill the legislation because he believed some of its language needed tweaking.
The other reality is that Republican Gov. Tate Reeves strongly opposes early voting proposals and even attacked England on social media for advancing the proposal out of the Senate chamber.
England said he received word “through some sources” that Reeves would veto the measure.
“I’m not done working on it, though,” England said.
Although Mississippi does not have no-excuse early voting or no-excuse absentee voting, it does have absentee voting.
To vote by absentee, a voter must meet one of around a dozen legal excuses, such as temporarily living outside of their county or being over 65. Mississippi law doesn’t allow people to vote by absentee purely out of convenience or choice.
Several conservative states, such as Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas and Florida, have an in-person early voting system. The Republican National Committee in 2023 urged Republican voters to cast an early ballot in states that have early voting procedures.
Yet some Republican leaders in Mississippi have ardently opposed early voting legislation over concerns that it undermines election security.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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Mississippi Today
Mississippi Legislature approves DEI ban after heated debate
Mississippi lawmakers have reached an agreement to ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs and a list of “divisive concepts” from public schools across the state education system, following the lead of numerous other Republican-controlled states and President Donald Trump’s administration.
House and Senate lawmakers approved a compromise bill in votes on Tuesday and Wednesday. It will likely head to Republican Gov. Tate Reeves for his signature after it clears a procedural motion.
The agreement between the Republican-dominated chambers followed hours of heated debate in which Democrats, almost all of whom are Black, excoriated the legislation as a setback in the long struggle to make Mississippi a fairer place for minorities. They also said the bill could bog universities down with costly legal fights and erode academic freedom.
Democratic Rep. Bryant Clark, who seldom addresses the entire House chamber from the podium during debates, rose to speak out against the bill on Tuesday. He is the son of the late Robert Clark, the first Black Mississippian elected to the state Legislature since the 1800s and the first Black Mississippian to serve as speaker pro tempore and preside over the House chamber since Reconstruction.
“We are better than this, and all of you know that we don’t need this with Mississippi history,” Clark said. “We should be the ones that say, ‘listen, we may be from Mississippi, we may have a dark past, but you know what, we’re going to be the first to stand up this time and say there is nothing wrong with DEI.'”
Legislative Republicans argued that the measure — which will apply to all public schools from the K-12 level through universities — will elevate merit in education and remove a list of so-called “divisive concepts” from academic settings. More broadly, conservative critics of DEI say the programs divide people into categories of victims and oppressors and infuse left-wing ideology into campus life.
“We are a diverse state. Nowhere in here are we trying to wipe that out,” said Republican Sen. Tyler McCaughn, one of the bill’s authors. “We’re just trying to change the focus back to that of excellence.”
The House and Senate initially passed proposals that differed in who they would impact, what activities they would regulate and how they aim to reshape the inner workings of the state’s education system. Some House leaders wanted the bill to be “semi-vague” in its language and wanted to create a process for withholding state funds based on complaints that almost anyone could lodge. The Senate wanted to pair a DEI ban with a task force to study inefficiencies in the higher education system, a provision the upper chamber later agreed to scrap.
The concepts that will be rooted out from curricula include the idea that gender identity can be a “subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality.” The move reflects another effort to align with the Trump administration, which has declared via executive order that there are only two sexes.
The House and Senate disagreed on how to enforce the measure but ultimately settled on an agreement that would empower students, parents of minor students, faculty members and contractors to sue schools for violating the law.
People could only sue after they go through an internal campus review process and a 25-day period when schools could fix the alleged violation. Republican Rep. Joey Hood, one of the House negotiators, said that was a compromise between the chambers. The House wanted to make it possible for almost anyone to file lawsuits over the DEI ban, while Senate negotiators initially bristled at the idea of fast-tracking internal campus disputes to the legal system.
The House ultimately held firm in its position to create a private cause of action, or the right to sue, but it agreed to give schools the ability to conduct an investigative process and potentially resolve the alleged violation before letting people sue in chancery courts.
“You have to go through the administrative process,” said Republican Sen. Nicole Boyd, one of the bill’s lead authors. “Because the whole idea is that, if there is a violation, the school needs to cure the violation. That’s what the purpose is. It’s not to create litigation, it’s to cure violations.”
If people disagree with the findings from that process, they could also ask the attorney general’s office to sue on their behalf.
Under the new law, Mississippi could withhold state funds from schools that don’t comply. Schools would be required to compile reports on all complaints filed in response to the new law.
Trump promised in his 2024 campaign to eliminate DEI in the federal government. One of the first executive orders he signed did that. Some Mississippi lawmakers introduced bills in the 2024 session to restrict DEI, but the proposals never made it out of committee. With the national headwinds at their backs and several other laws in Republican-led states to use as models, Mississippi lawmakers made plans to introduce anti-DEI legislation.
The policy debate also unfolded amid the early stages of a potential Republican primary matchup in the 2027 governor’s race between State Auditor Shad White and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann. White, who has been one of the state’s loudest advocates for banning DEI, had branded Hosemann in the months before the 2025 session “DEI Delbert,” claiming the Senate leader has stood in the way of DEI restrictions passing the Legislature.
During the first Senate floor debate over the chamber’s DEI legislation during this year’s legislative session, Hosemann seemed to be conscious of these political attacks. He walked over to staff members and asked how many people were watching the debate live on YouTube.
As the DEI debate cleared one of its final hurdles Wednesday afternoon, the House and Senate remained at loggerheads over the state budget amid Republican infighting. It appeared likely the Legislature would end its session Wednesday or Thursday without passing a $7 billion budget to fund state agencies, potentially threatening a government shutdown.
“It is my understanding that we don’t have a budget and will likely leave here without a budget. But this piece of legislation …which I don’t think remedies any of Mississippi’s issues, this has become one of the top priorities that we had to get done,” said Democratic Sen. Rod Hickman. “I just want to say, if we put that much work into everything else we did, Mississippi might be a much better place.”
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
House gives Senate 5 p.m. deadline to come to table, or legislative session ends with no state budget
The House on Wednesday attempted one final time to revive negotiations between it and the Senate over passing a state budget.
Otherwise, the two Republican-led chambers will likely end their session without funding government services for the next fiscal year and potentially jeopardize state agencies.
The House on Wednesday unanimously passed a measure to extend the legislative session and revive budget bills that had died on legislative deadlines last weekend.
House Speaker Jason White said he did not have any prior commitment that the Senate would agree to the proposal, but he wanted to extend one last offer to pass the budget. White, a Republican from West, said if he did not hear from the Senate by 5 p.m. on Wednesday, his chamber would end its regular session.
“The ball is in their court,” White said of the Senate. “Every indication has been that they would not agree to extend the deadlines for purposes of doing the budget. I don’t know why that is. We did it last year, and we’ve done it most years.”
But it did not appear likely Wednesday afternoon that the Senate would comply.
The Mississippi Legislature has not left Jackson without setting at least most of the state budget since 2009, when then Gov. Haley Barbour had to force them back to set one to avoid a government shutdown.
The House measure to extend the session is now before the Senate for consideration. To pass, it would require a two-thirds majority vote of senators. But that might prove impossible. Numerous senators on both sides of the aisle vowed to vote against extending the current session, and Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann who oversees the chamber said such an extension likely couldn’t pass.
Senate leadership seemed surprised at the news that the House passed the resolution to negotiate a budget, and several senators earlier on Wednesday made passing references to ending the session without passing a budget.
“We’ll look at it after it passes the full House,” Senate President Pro Tempore Dean Kirby said.
The House and Senate, each having a Republican supermajority, have fought over many issues since the legislative session began early January.
But the battle over a tax overhaul plan, including elimination of the state individual income tax, appeared to cause a major rift. Lawmakers did pass a tax overhaul, which the governor has signed into law, but Senate leaders cried foul over how it passed, with the House seizing on typos in the Senate’s proposal that accidentally resembled the House’s more aggressive elimination plan.
The Senate had urged caution in eliminating the income tax, and had economic growth triggers that would have likely phased in the elimination over many years. But the typos essentially negated the triggers, and the House and governor ran with it.
The two chambers have also recently fought over the budget. White said he communicated directly with Senate leaders that the House would stand firm on not passing a budget late in the session.
But Senate leaders said they had trouble getting the House to meet with them to haggle out the final budget.
On the normally scheduled “conference weekend” with a deadline to agree to a budget last Saturday, the House did not show, taking the weekend off. This angered Hosemann and the Senate. All the budget bills died, requiring a vote to extend the session, or the governor forcing them into a special session.
If the Legislature ends its regular session without adopting a budget, the only option to fund state agencies before their budgets expire on June 30 is for Gov. Tate Reeves to call lawmakers back into a special session later.
“There really isn’t any other option (than the governor calling a special session),” Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann previously said.
If Reeves calls a special session, he gets to set the Legislature’s agenda. A special session call gives an otherwise constitutionally weak Mississippi governor more power over the Legislature.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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