ACLU of Missouri attorney Gillian Wilcox takes notes while a witness testifies in Missouri’s gender-affirming care trial in Cole County Circuit Court (Annelise Hanshaw/Missouri Independent).
Missouri’s defense of a state law barring minors from beginning puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones will depend on whether the judge in the case puts stock in expert witnesses touting retracted studies and conspiracy theories about Jerry Sandusky.
Wright County Circuit Court Judge Craig Carter, who is presiding over a lawsuit challenging Missouri’s gender-affirming care restrictions, will have to weigh the credibility of expert witnesses alongside his judgment.
Questions of credibility came up Tuesday, when the Missouri Attorney General’s Office called as a witness John Michael Bailey, a psychology professor at Northwestern who testified about his now-retracted study entitled “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria,” which concludes that adolescents identify as transgender as a result of social contagion.
But it was his social media post about the accusers of Jerry Sandusky that appeared to concern Carter.
Sandusky, a former college football coach, was convicted of molesting young boys over a period of at least 15 years. Bailey repeatedly posted on social media that he believes Sandusky is innocent.
Judge Craig Carter, a Wright County judge serving in Cole County for Missouri’s gender-affirming care trial, listens to a nurse practitioner testify last week (Annelise Hanshaw/Missouri Independent).
“You believe the people testifying against Jerry Sandusky are lying?” Carter asked.
“I can see that if you are not familiar with the evidence that I am familiar with, you would be shocked,” Bailey told him.
“Mmhmm,” Carter replied.
Bailey said he had listened to a podcast and lauded the work of conservative commentator John Ziegler.
“Do you know (Ziegler)? Have you talked to anybody that was an eyewitness in that case?” Carter asked.
“I have read testimony, but I have not talked to anyone,” Bailey said.
Although the underlying case was not about Sandusky, the exchange may have chiseled away at Bailey’s credibility and showed a greater pattern of basing conclusions on secondary sources.
Bailey’s research on transgender youth has been retracted, which he chalked up to pressure from activists.
The academic journal that retracted his article cited an issue with informed consent protocol, meaning participants didn’t know their responses would be in an article. On cross-examination, the circumstances of his research became clearer.
To investigate his hypothesis of whether “rapid onset gender dysphoria” caused a rise in referrals to gender clinics, Bailey surveyed parents and guardians who interacted with the website ParentsofROGDKids.com, a website for parents who believe their child has rapid onset gender dysphoria.
He said the study’s co-author Suzanna Diaz isn’t a researcher, so she didn’t create the survey with typical informed-consent procedures. He didn’t explain that Diaz is a pseudonym.
He knew Diaz was associated with ParentsofROGDKids.com but didn’t know her real name and if she ran the website.
Diaz had created the questionnaire to “weed out troublemakers.”
When Bailey looked into detransitioners and desisters, which are people who have stopped or reversed gender-affirming care, he looked to the website Reddit and looked at groups titled “detrans” and “desist.”
Plaintiffs’ attorney Nora Huppert asked if he verified that participants had previously been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Bailey admitted that he had not.
The other defense expert on the stand Tuesday was Dr. Daniel Weiss, an endocrinologist from Utah.
For 10 years in Ohio, Weiss accepted transgender adults as patients that needed cross-sex hormones, but later decided the intervention was harmful to prescribe.
“I’m opposed to it medically,” Weiss said of adults using cross-sex hormones to transition. “I think there’s no scientific evidence to support it. But if someone wants to do it, and they’re adequately informed, they can do it.”
His testimony included a look at adverse event reporting of puberty blockers, which he does not prescribe, and the discussion of risks to gender-affirming care.
When asked to compare the risks of puberty blockers to aspirin, he couldn’t make a direct comparison.
“It’s hard to compare,” he said. “With any intervention, you want to balance risk and benefit and look at all the treatment options.”
Gillian Wilcox, an attorney with the ACLU of Missouri, asked if he has published a peer-reviewed article on gender dysphoria. He hadn’t.
“My article, if I were to write one, would be rejected by most medical journals because there is no good treatment,” Weiss said. “I call it child-harming treatment. There is no good intervention.”
He has testified in favor of state bans on gender-affirming care for minors. He told Wilcox that the Center for Christian Virtue, an advocacy group with anti-LGBTQ views, asked him to testify and he was paid to prepare his testimony.
He does not have clinical experience with minors.
In the state’s pretrial brief, Solicitor General Joshua Divine wrote that defendants will only need to prove “medical and scientific uncertainty” to show that state lawmakers are allowed to enact restrictions on gender-affirming care.
Although the state has entered the trial confident in the task ahead, credibility may limit what the judge will consider from its experts.
Other witnesses Tuesday included parents, one of which lives in Chicago, who disagreed with their children about their transition.
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