It's been harder and harder lately to find areas of agreement with Missouri Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft, but he is absolutely correct in his unusually frank assessment of unelected Attorney General Andrew Bailey's upcoming order sharply restricting medical treatment for transgender minors and adults. Ashcroft joins other Republican politicians who recognize the harm this lurch to the extreme right on cultural issues is doing to their party. Ashcroft himself has been a part of that lurch when it comes to censoring literature at public libraries, but even he draws the line when it comes to imposing restrictions on the ability of adults to make their own decisions.

Speaking to the Post-Dispatch's Jack Suntrup Wednesday, Ashcroft said he disagrees with regulations Bailey will start enforcing on April 27 restricting hormone therapy and surgery for transgender children and adults. "I wouldn't want to be the attorney that was defending it," Ashcroft said. Particularly when it comes to adults, Bailey is overreaching, Ashcroft suggested. "If you're an adult, you have the capacity to make your own decisions. ... I don't believe it's the role of government to forbid it."

There are lots of aspects of Bailey's order that merit sharp public and court scrutiny. He is invoking it as an emergency, citing the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act. Transgender care and sex-reassignment surgeries have been around for at least five decades, but Bailey seems to think that only now does this merit the same status as, say, a pandemic, mass rioting or a catastrophic tornado. He justifies the emergency declaration by blindly asserting that gender-dysphoria treatments have "accelerated exponentially."

His rules for both adults and minors require doctors to prove that the patient is not suffering from "social media addiction or compulsion." Bailey would be hard-pressed to find any young person anywhere who isn't addicted to social media, yet he sets an impossibly high standard for these doctors to meet. He also requires doctors to affirm that their patients' gender dysphoria is not the result of "social contagion."

Doctors can be punished if they fail to track all adverse effects of treatment over a period "not less than 15 years" — a standard that any court should find onerous and arbitrary.

Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson also believes his fellow Republicans are going too far. In 2021, he vetoed a bill that sought to do what Bailey is trying to do in Missouri. "This is too extreme," Hutchinson told NPR at the time, and puts "a very vulnerable population in a more difficult position." He added: "But also in my veto, I wanted to say to my Republican friends and colleagues that we've got to rethink our engagement in every aspect of the cultural wars."

Sadly, Bailey is so immersed in the social contagion of GOP extremist grandstanding that he didn't get Hutchinson's message. And he probably won't get Ashcroft's either.

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