Mississippi Today
‘What are we doing?’: Protesters say legislative focus on anti-trans bill misplaced amid health care crisis
‘What are we doing?’: Protesters say legislative focus on anti-trans bill misplaced amid health care crisis
Trans kids, supportive parents and activists from across Mississippi gathered on the south-facing steps of the Capitol on Wednesday to rally against a bill that would ban gender-affirming medical care for trans minors.
More than 50 people attended the protest against House Bill 1125, called the “Regulate Experimental Procedures for Adolescents Act,” holding colorful signs and wearing the pink, blue and white trans pride flags draped on their shoulders.
Some trans kids who attended, like Theodore Milnor, a 15-year-old freshman at Tougaloo Early College High School, had excused absences from school. Milnor’s counselor gave him one condition: To write a report on the protest and present it to the whole school for kids who couldn’t go.
Before the protest started, Milnor turned to a family friend, Tifani Keith, who’d come with him because his parents couldn’t get off work. He said he was anxious.
“We’re in a very safe and loving place right now,” Keith told him as they walked up the Capitol steps.
Inside the building, conservative lawmakers have fast-tracked HB 1125 without consulting trans kids or providers of gender-affirming care, an evidence-based form of treatment that is supported by every major medical association in the U.S. If the bill passes, providers could lose their license if they continue to treat trans kids, and anyone who “aids and abets” gender-affirming care for trans kids could be sued for damages for up to 30 years, in a provision modeled off a Texas anti-abortion bill.
“It is infantilizing, unfair, discriminatory and frankly unconstitutional,” said McKenna Raney-Gray, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi’s LGBTQ Justice Project. “This is the kind of thing the ACLU was designed to fight against.”
The bill has yet to pass the Senate but it is backed by a powerful coalition of lawmakers, including Gov. Tate Reeves who has indicated he’ll sign it.
“The fact is that we set age restrictions on driving a car and on getting a tattoo,” Reeves said during his State of the State address. “We don’t let 11-year-olds enter an R-rated movie alone, yet some would have us believe that we should push permanent, body-altering surgeries on them at such a young age.”
Other lawmakers have likened gender-affirming care to child abuse and called the bill a measure to protect kids. But at the rally, speakers said the bill will do the exact opposite: by denying trans kids the opportunity to transition, they say HB 1125 will increase the risk of suicide among a population that is already disproportionately vulnerable to mental illness. Nationally, trans youth attempt suicide at a rate more than four times their cisgender peers due to social stigma and discrimination. Research has repeatedly shown that gender-affirming care significantly boosts the chances that trans kids will live to see adulthood.
READ MORE: What to know about gender-affirming care in Mississippi
Some of the trans kids who attended, like Milnor, have not started gender-affirming care but still view the bill as an attack on their rights.
“This bill is not about health care in my point of view,” he said. “I feel it is more about ostracizing trans people.”
Gender-affirming care is already difficult to obtain in Mississippi. There is likely only one clinic in the state that offers gender-affirming care, with parental consent, to 16- and 17-year-old trans teenagers. The number of kids in the state who have prescriptions to hormones or puberty blockers — treatment that is reversible — could likely fit in a whole classroom, according to in-state providers of gender-affirming care.
In speeches, House lawmakers like Rep. Nick Bain, R-Corinth, a co-sponsor of the bill, could not name a single instance of trans kids undergoing surgery in Mississippi. There is no clinic in Mississippi that offers gender-confirmation surgery to trans kids, according to providers.
“Believe me, the gentleman from Corinth did not come up with this idea one afternoon in the duck hunt,” said Clint Faulkner, a father who drove up from Sumrall with his child to attend the rally. “He got a call from a special interest group. … That’s what bothers me.”
Multiple speakers asked, rhetorically, why lawmakers are prioritizing HB 1125 instead of other health care issues in Mississippi, like the rural hospital crisis or the worsening rate of maternal mortality, one of the highest in America.
“My question, as always, is this,” said Lance Presley, a reverend at Broadmeadow United Methodist Church in Jackson. “Why is it that every time folks in this building start talking about protecting our children, it’s never about making sure that our children in this state have adequate nutrition, it’s never about making sure that the kids in this state live past childhood?”
“Why is it always – when they talk about protecting children – why is it always about hurting the kids who are already hurting most,” he continued.
Ashley Moore, the mother of a trans child, echoed Presley’s point.
“What are we doing?” she said. “We rank last in so many things, and we’re trying to take away our children’s rights? Gender-affirming care is evidence-based. Everybody seems to be overlooking that.”
Moore said that she was so scared to speak out against the bill she was shaking, but that, “I am even more terrified of what will happen to my child and my family if this is passed.”
Leviathan Myers-Rowell, a 16-year-old high school junior, talked about what it’s like to be a trans kid in Mississippi, an experience he said lawmakers don’t understand. He quoted a comment that Sen. Joey Fillingane, R-Sumrall, made in a Senate committee claiming that parents are forcing gender-affirming care on trans kids.
“This is horrifying to me because it just isn’t true,” Myers-Rowell said. “There are no parents out there who actually want to choose the gender assignment of their children … the reality is being trans is hard, and nobody chooses this.”
After speeches finished, protesters marched two blocks to the Governor’s Mansion, waving flags and chanting “protect trans youth.”
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 1946
Dec. 23, 1946
University of Tennessee refused to play a basketball game with Duquesne University, because they had a Black player, Chuck Cooper. Despite their refusal, the all-American player and U.S. Navy veteran went on to become the first Black player to participate in a college basketball game south of the Mason-Dixon line. Cooper became the first Black player ever drafted in the NBA — drafted by the Boston Celtics. He went on to be admitted to the Basketball Hall of Fame.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
Podcast: Ray Higgins: PERS needs both extra cash and benefit changes for future employees
Mississippi Today’s Bobby Harrison talks with Ray Higgins, executive director of the Mississippi Public Employees Retirement System, about proposed changes in pension benefits for future employees and what is needed to protect the system for current employees and retirees. Higgins also stresses the importance of the massive system to the Mississippi economy.
READ MORE: As lawmakers look to cut taxes, Mississippi mayors and county leaders outline infrastructure needs
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
Mississippi Today
‘Bringing mental health into the spaces where moms already are’: UMMC program takes off
A program aimed at increasing access to mental health services for mothers has taken off at the University of Mississippi Medical Center.
The program, called CHAMP4Moms, is an extension of an existing program called CHAMP – which stands for Child Access to Mental Health and Psychiatry. The goal is to make it easier for moms to reach mental health resources during a phase when some may need it the most and have the least time.
CHAMP4Moms offers a direct phone line that health providers can call if they are caring for a pregnant woman or new mother they believe may have unaddressed mental health issues. On the line, health providers can speak directly to a reproductive psychiatrist who can guide them on how to screen, diagnose and treat mothers. That means that moms don’t have to go out of their way to find a psychiatrist, and health care providers who don’t have extensive training in psychiatry can still help these women.
“Basically, we’re trying to bring mental health into the spaces where moms already are,” explained Calandrea Taylor, the program manager. “Because of the low workforce that we have in the state, it’s a lot to try to fill the state with mental health providers. But what we do is bring the mental health practice to you and where mothers are. And we’re hoping that that reduces stigma.”
Launched in 2023, the program has had a slow lift off, Taylor said. But the phone line is up and running, as the team continues to make additions to the program – including a website with resources that Taylor expects will go live next year.
To fill the role of medical director, UMMC brought in a California-based reproductive psychiatrist, Dr. Emily Dossett. Dossett, who grew up in Mississippi and still has family in the state, says it has been rewarding to come full circle and serve her home state – which suffers a dearth of mental health providers and has no reproductive psychiatrists.
“I love it. It’s really satisfying to take the experience I’ve been able to pull together over the past 20 years practicing medicine and then apply it to a place I love,” Dossett said. “I feel like I understand the people I work with, I relate to them, I like hearing where they’re from and being able to picture it … That piece of it has really been very much a joy.”
As medical director, Dossett is able to educate maternal health providers on mental health issues. But she’s also an affiliate professor at UMMC, which she says allows her to train up the next generation of psychiatrists on the importance of maternal and reproductive psychiatry – an often-overlooked aspect in the field.
If people think of reproductive mental health at all, they likely think of postpartum depression, Dossett said. But reproductive psychiatry is far more encompassing than just the postpartum time period – and includes many more conditions than just depression.
“Most reproductive psychiatrists work with pregnant and postpartum people, but there’s also work to be done around people who have issues connected to their menstrual cycle or perimenopause,” she explained. “… There’s depression, certainly. But we actually see more anxiety, which comes in lots of different forms – it can be panic disorder, general anxiety, OCD.”
Tackling mental health in this population doesn’t just improve people’s quality of life. It can be lifesaving – and has the potential to mitigate some of the state’s worst health metrics.
Mental health disorders are the leading cause of pregnancy-related death, which is defined by the Centers for Disease Control as any death up to a year postpartum that is caused by or worsened by pregnancy.
In Mississippi, 80% of pregnancy-related deaths between 2016 and 2020 were deemed preventable, according to the latest Mississippi Maternal Mortality Report.
Mississippi is not alone in this, Dossett said. Historically, mental health has not been taken seriously in the western world, for a number of reasons – including stigma and a somewhat arbitrary division between mind and body, Dossett explained.
“You see commercials on TV of happy pregnant ladies. You see magazines of celebrities and their baby bumps, and everybody is super happy. And so, if you don’t feel that way, there’s this tremendous amount of shame … But another part of it is medicine and the way that our health system is set up, it’s just classically divided between physical and mental health.”
Dossett encourages women to tell their doctor about any challenges they’re facing – even if they seem normal.
“There are a lot of people who have significant symptoms, but they think it’s normal,” Dossett said. “They don’t know that there’s a difference between the sort of normal adjustment that people have after having a baby – and it is a huge adjustment – and symptoms that get in the way of their ability to connect or bond with the baby, or their ability to eat or sleep, or take care of their other children or eventually go to work.”
She also encourages health care providers to develop a basic understanding of mental health issues and to ask patients questions about their mood, thoughts and feelings.
CHAMP4Moms is a resource Dossett hopes providers will take advantage of – but she also hopes they will shape and inform the program in its inaugural year.
“We’re available, we’re open for calls, we’re open for feedback and suggestions, we’re open for collaboration,” she said. “We want this to be something that can hopefully really move the needle on perinatal mental health and substance use in the state – and I think it can.”
Providers can call the CHAMP main line at 601-984-2080 for resources and referral options throughout the state.
This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
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