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UMMC to shut down LGBTQ+ clinic amid political pressure

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The University of Mississippi Medical Center will dissolve the LGBTQ+ clinic that came under lawmakers’ scrutiny last fall because it offered gender-affirming care like hormone therapy and puberty blockers to trans minors.

About 67 LGBTQ+ adults who have received services at the clinic this year, from routine check-ups to gender-affirming care, will be affected. It’s unclear if trans adults will be able to receive gender-affirming care at other UMMC clinics.

The co-director of the center that oversees the TEAM clinic said he felt “completely blindsided” by the decision to close operations on June 30, which was made without him, and worries about the ethics of suddenly closing a specialized clinic for a marginalized group of patients.

“This is an institution responding in fear not responding in reason,” said Alex Mills, a tenure-track professor of pharmacy at University of Mississippi and the co-director of the Center for Gender and Sexual Minority Health. He oversaw operations at the TEAM clinic. “It’s demoralizing and dehumanizing to the LGBTQ community.”

The surprise decision is “based in part” on a legislative committee report released last month that included recommendations for steps UMMC could take to shutter the pioneering TEAM, or “Trustworthy, Evidence-based, Affirming, Multidisciplinary,” clinic, wrote Dr. Alan Jones, the associate vice chancellor for clinical affairs, in an email Thursday morning.

“UMMC will cease operations of the clinic at the end of this academic year, June 30, 2023, read Jones’ email to clinic providers. “All patients who are currently scheduled will be contacted by phone in the coming days about this change. Please work with your department chair to ensure a smooth process during this change.”

UMMC did not respond to questions about the future of clinic patients’ care by the time this story published.

Services for trans kids have been limited at UMMC since executive leadership decided the clinic should stop seeing minors after lawmakers complained, according to emails obtained by Mississippi Today. Then the Legislature passed House Bill 1125 earlier this year, banning gender-affirming care for trans youth entirely.

By Thursday afternoon, the webpages for TEAM Clinic and the Center for Gender and Sexual Minority Health had been taken down from UMMC’s website.

“They are erasing us,” Mills said.

He has several new patients scheduled for their first appointment at TEAM clinic tomorrow — now he doesn’t know what he’s going to tell them.

Immediately after receiving the email, Mills wrote to Jones’ assistant requesting a meeting, hoping to ask if UMMC could postpone the shutdown for 90 days to give patients a smooth transition.

Mills got an email back from Brian Rutledge, Vice Chancellor Dr. LouAnn Woodward’s chief of staff, Thursday afternoon. His request was denied.

“Dr. Jones is not able to meet, but UMMC will be handling everything regarding the UMMC TEAM clinic and its patients,” Rutledge wrote. “After this point, I would encourage you to work directly with your UM School of Pharmacy chair or dean on how this impacts your practice responsibilities within your faculty role there.”

Mills said his department chair’s request to meet with Jones was also denied.

Since the decision was made without him, Mills said he doesn’t know what leadership’s transition plan entails.

He’s planning to write up a letter to give to patients tomorrow, but he doesn’t know if UMMC leadership has already made one. He doesn’t know who will be notifying his patients, what they will be told or the kind of care UMMC will give them once the month is up — or even who will be their providers.

He doesn’t know what will happen to the clinic space or to the three grant proposals he just submitted.

“Why isn’t that being communicated to the people who run the damn clinic?” Mills said.

The legislative committee report, published by the Joint Committee on Performance Evaluation and Expenditure Review, or PEER, recommended that UMMC could dissolve the TEAM clinic by “integrating services” back into the medical center’s regular care setting and offer “optional LGBTQ training courses to all staff and students.”

Even if UMMC fully follows PEER’s recommendation and continues to provide gender-affirming care for trans adults, Mills said he doesn’t know if it will be done in a respectful and dignified manner. What made the TEAM clinic unique, Mills said, is that it is a dedicated space where LGBTQ+ patients could be assured that every employee, from the receptionists to the nurses, believe trans people exist and would use the right pronouns.

That’s why the clinic was cofounded in 2015 by Dr. Scott Rodgers, who is now UMMC’s associate vice chancellor for academic affairs: To try to help LGBTQ+ Mississippians overcome one of the biggest barriers to care they face, which is finding providers who respect their sexual and gender identity.

A 2019 press release from UMMC emphasized the clinic’s unique mission: to “ensure every Mississippian has access to accepting, high-quality and holistic primary health care” regardless of their gender identity or sexual orientation.

Mills feared this was going to happen ever since UMMC leadership decided the clinic should stop providing care to trans youth after lawmakers complained last fall. When that happened, Mills said he at least had some input.

“Mind you, it was secretive, but we had a meeting to discuss a plan, at least, that was appropriate and ethical,” he said. “But this is just not how leaders should work. It’s not how you should be conducting yourself in any workplace. It’s just a really big slap to the face.”

Now he is concerned that even if the TEAM clinic is shut down and its services are dispersed across the medical center, it still won’t be enough to appease lawmakers.

“They are trying to erase a group of people,” Mills said. “If they find out it’s going to be throughout other clinics, people are now going to complain and say all of UMMC is doing this.”

“I hope and pray that’s not the case,” he added.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Mississippi Today

On this day in 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois urged active resistance to racist policies

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-27 07:00:00

April 27, 1903

W.E.B. Du Bois by James E. Purdy in 1907 from the National Portrait Gallery.

W.E.B. Du Bois, in his book, “The Souls of Black Folk,” called for active resistance to racist policies: “We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white.” 

He described the tension between being Black and being an American: “One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” 

He criticized Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise” speech. Six years later, Du Bois helped found the NAACP and became the editor of its monthly magazine, The Crisis. He waged protests against the racist silent film “The Birth of a Nation” and against lynchings of Black Americans, detailing the 2,732 lynchings between 1884 and 1914. 

In 1921, he decried Harvard University’s decisions to ban Black students from the dormitories as an attempt to renew “the Anglo-Saxon cult, the worship of the Nordic totem, the disenfranchisement of Negro, Jew, Irishman, Italian, Hungarian, Asiatic and South Sea Islander — the world rule of Nordic white through brute force.” 

In 1929, he debated Lothrop Stoddard, a proponent of scientific racism, who also happened to belong to the Ku Klux Klan. The Chicago Defender’s front page headline read, “5,000 Cheer W.E.B. DuBois, Laugh at Lothrup Stoddard.” 

In 1949, the FBI began to investigate Du Bois as a “suspected Communist,” and he was indicted on trumped-up charges that he had acted as an agent of a foreign state and had failed to register. The government dropped the case after Albert Einstein volunteered to testify as a character witness. 

Despite the lack of conviction, the government confiscated his passport for eight years. In 1960, he recovered his passport and traveled to the newly created Republic of Ghana. Three years later, the U.S. government refused to renew his passport, so Du Bois became a citizen of Ghana. He died on Aug. 27, 1963, the eve of the March on Washington.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Mississippi Today

Jim Hood’s opinion provides a roadmap if lawmakers do the unthinkable and can’t pass a budget

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mississippitoday.org – @BobbyHarrison9 – 2025-04-27 06:00:00

On June 30, 2009, Sam Cameron, the then-executive director of the Mississippi Hospital Association, held a news conference in the Capitol rotunda to publicly take his whipping and accept his defeat.

Cameron urged House Democrats, who had sided with the Hospital Association, to accept the demands of Republican Gov. Haley Barbour to place an additional $90 million tax on the state’s hospitals to help fund Medicaid and prevent the very real possibility of the program and indeed much of state government being shut down when the new budget year began in a few hours. The impasse over Medicaid and the hospital tax had stopped all budget negotiations.

Barbour watched from a floor above as Cameron publicly admitted defeat. Cameron’s decision to swallow his pride was based on a simple equation. He told news reporters, scores of lobbyists and health care advocates who had set up camp in the Capitol as midnight on July 1 approached that, while he believed the tax would hurt Mississippi hospitals, not having a Medicaid budget would be much more harmful.

Just as in 2009, the Legislature ended the 2025 regular session earlier this month without a budget agreement and will have to come back in special session to adopt a budget before the new fiscal year begins on July 1. It is unlikely that the current budget rift between the House and Senate will be as dramatic as the 2009 standoff when it appeared only hours before the July 1 deadline that there would be no budget. But who knows what will result from the current standoff? After all, the current standoff in many ways seems to be more about political egos than policy differences on the budget.

The fight centers around multiple factors, including:

  • Whether legislation will be passed to allow sports betting outside of casinos.
  • Whether the Senate will agree to a massive projects bill to fund local projects throughout the state.
  • Whether leaders will overcome hard feelings between the two chambers caused by the House’s hasty final passage of a Senate tax cut bill filled with typos that altered the intent of the bill without giving the Senate an opportunity to fix the mistakes.
  • Whether members would work on a weekend at the end of the session. The Senate wanted to, the House did not.

It is difficult to think any of those issues will rise to the ultimate level of preventing the final passage of a budget when push comes to shove.

But who knows? What we do know is that the impasse in 2009 created a guideline of what could happen if a budget is not passed.

It is likely that parts, though not all, of state government will shut down if the Legislature does the unthinkable and does not pass a budget for the new fiscal year beginning July 1.

An official opinion of the office of Attorney General Jim Hood issued in 2009 said if there is no budget passed by the Legislature, those services mandated in the Mississippi Constitution, such as a public education system, will continue.

According to the Hood opinion, other entities, such as the state’s debt, and court and federal mandates, also would be funded. But it is likely that there will not be funds for Medicaid and many other programs, such as transportation and aspects of public safety that are not specifically listed in the Mississippi Constitution.

The Hood opinion reasoned that the Mississippi Constitution is the ultimate law of the state and must be adhered to even in the absence of legislative action. Other states have reached similar conclusions when their legislatures have failed to act, the AG’s opinion said.

As is often pointed out, the opinion of the attorney general does not carry the weight of law. It serves only as a guideline, though Gov. Tate Reeves has relied on the 2009 opinion even though it was written by the staff of Hood, who was Reeves’ opponent in the contentious 2019 gubernatorial campaign.

But if the unthinkable ever occurs and the Legislature goes too far into a new fiscal year without adopting a budget, it most likely will be the courts — moreso than an AG’s opinion — that ultimately determine if and how state government operates.

In 2009 Sam Cameron did not want to see what would happen if a budget was not adopted. It also is likely that current political leaders do not want to see the results of not having a budget passed before July 1 of this year.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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Mississippi Today

1964: Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was formed

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mississippitoday.org – @MSTODAYnews – 2025-04-26 07:00:00

April 26, 1964

Aaron Henry testifies before the Credentials Committee at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.

Civil rights activists started the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to challenge the state’s all-white regular delegation to the Democratic National Convention. 

The regulars had already adopted this resolution: “We oppose, condemn and deplore the Civil Rights Act of 1964 … We believe in separation of the races in all phases of our society. It is our belief that the separation of the races is necessary for the peace and tranquility of all the people of Mississippi, and the continuing good relationship which has existed over the years.” 

In reality, Black Mississippians had been victims of intimidation, harassment and violence for daring to try and vote as well as laws passed to disenfranchise them. As a result, by 1964, only 6% of Black Mississippians were permitted to vote. A year earlier, activists had run a mock election in which thousands of Black Mississippians showed they would vote if given an opportunity. 

In August 1964, the Freedom Party decided to challenge the all-white delegation, saying they had been illegally elected in a segregated process and had no intention of supporting President Lyndon B. Johnson in the November election. 

The prediction proved true, with white Mississippi Democrats overwhelmingly supporting Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, who opposed the Civil Rights Act. While the activists fell short of replacing the regulars, their courageous stand led to changes in both parties.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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