After three days of battling over scientific papers and expert testimony , the trial of a lawsuit challenging Missouri’s restrictions on gender-affirming treatments on Thursday turned to the impact the law has on patients and providers.
Nicole Carr, a nurse practitioner at Southampton Community Healthcare in St. Louis, said anxiety, fear and depression first increased in transgender patients when Attorney General Andrew Bailey published an emergency rule that established barriers to care in April 2023 .
“No one thinks about how these laws affect the actual people they are supposed to protect and they are supposed to serve,” she said.
Patients were crying in the clinic in fear, she testified.
“I’m trying to give them hope that they don’t have to fear being in Missouri, that they don’t have to fear coming to me as a provider, that they can move past this,” Carr said. “It’s sad because I’m referring a lot of people to therapy that, before these rules, were fine.”
She worries about youth in foster care, which she worked with frequently in a previous position. Transgender teenagers in foster care often must wait until they turn 18 to go to the doctor alone for assessment to obtain hormone-replacement therapy.