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Elaine Cha: This is St. Louis on the air. From St. Louis public Radio, I'm Elaine Cha. It is a scary time to be trans in Missouri. In the last year on our show, we've featured the voices of trans people, their families, their doctors, their supporters. They describe for us what it feels like to have their lives, their most personal decisions labeled as a problem in need of legislative correction. Trans people in Missouri are once again watching the legislature as it considers dozens of bills that could further restrict their lives. But there's a larger story here, and Missouri plays a key role in it on the national stage. Our producer, Danny Wicentowski has been exploring that story.
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Danny Wicentowski: Here's Danny in the Missouri legislature, 2023 was the year that the state went in on laws that target transgender people, from student sports to medical care. The wave of bills led to new laws, restrictions on gender affirming care, and included efforts to close the very clinics that provided that care. It's a new year, but this is happening again. Last month, lawmakers spent over 8 hours debating bills that would go even further than the ones they passed in 2023. But there is a bigger picture here. What happens in Missouri isn't just about Missouri. For observers of the national landscape, Missouri is a bellwether and a trendsetter. Republican leaders like the state's attorney general, Andrew Bailey, are setting that tone for how to attack ideas about gender identity and gender transition. And other states are taking notice. To talk about Missouri's place in this movement and this moment, I'm joined by two trans journalists who have spent a lot of time looking at what's happening in our state and how it fits in the national landscape. Erin Reed is a journalist based in Washington, D. C. She is the author of the newsletter Erin in the Morning, and she's published numerous pieces covering Missouri's legislation and politics. Erin Reed, welcome to our show.
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Tony: Hi. Thank you so much for having me on.
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Danny Wicentowski: And connecting. From Charlottesville, Virginia, is Evan Urquhart. Evan is the founder of Assigned Media, a news site dedicated to daily coverage of the people and organizations who are trying to restrict the lives of trans people. Evan, it is great to have you here.
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Vanessa: It's good to be here.
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Danny Wicentowski: I want to start looking back at the year it was. Now, Aaron, you wrote a recent column in the Guardian, and you called Missouri ground zero for the fire hose of anti-trans legislation. Now, you were describing this current year of 2024, but it was last year when Missouri started passing bills that targeted trans people at school and in the doctor's office and in sports fields and in the bathroom. Now, to start us off, looking back at 2023, was there a moment or a bill when you realized that Missouri wasn't just following these trends, but was a major actor in it?
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Tony: Yes, of course. And you did mention several bills that were passed last year, bills that target trans people in bathrooms and sports, as well as their medical care. But it was the gender affirming care ban in Missouri that very clearly showed that Missouri would be a trendsetter because its ban went further than most other states. For instance, Missouri was, I believe, the first state to ban gender affirming care for incarcerated trans adults. Basically going into targeting adults as well as transgender youth in their bill.
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Danny Wicentowski: Did something change, I guess, in the national landscape? Did that send a signal to other states?
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Tony: Yeah, it did send a signal to other states, and something did know. I don't know if you remember, but whenever that bill was being debated, Attorney General Andrew Bailey announced that he would start to restrict trans adults by saying that trans adults no longer could get gender affirming care if they didn't have two years of psych evaluations, or that trans adults had to cure depression and anxiety before getting gender affirming care, even if gender dysphoria was the cause of that depression or anxiety. Essentially banning gender affirming care for many trans adults in the state. And the reason why I mentioned this is because it was a very important moment, because after that, we started to see a few other states take similar actions. We saw this in Florida, and very recently, we saw this in Ohio, where they also targeted trans adults with essentially rule changes.
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Danny Wicentowski: Evan, I wanted to ask you about this as well, because you started assigned media. Last year was when it really got off the ground. And I'm wondering, what was it about last year and the actions of legislatures like Missouri that made you want to cover this in a more overt way?
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Vanessa: Yeah. So last September, October, I was very frustrated that I felt there was this wave of propagandistic, sort of right wing news coverage of trans issues, including trans women in sports, gender affirming care, particularly for youth, a few other kind of styles of story. And it was just all day, every day on right wing media. I once timed listening to right wing media to see kind of at the height, how long it took for them to mention trans issues. I think it was less than ten minutes. And then there was this sort of on the other side, in terms of the mainstream media or the left leaning media, which aren't exactly the same thing, there was this sort of gulf of lack of information, lack of news. And I just felt that if one of the two major parties in the United States has made attacking trans people their primary focus and their primary legislative focus, that really needs a lot more news coverage than it was getting now, of course, when it came to Missouri, it was certainly a pathbreaker in terms of anti trans propaganda because of, as you know, and I know you've covered the allegations of Jamie Reed, who was a former clinic.
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Danny Wicentowski: Right. And let's get into that, because I think in terms of what made Missouri especially impactful and influential last year, this story that involved a former case worker who had worked at the Washington University Transgender center at St. Louis Children's Hospital, she released a whistleblower complaint, first through a website called the free press and later through a legal affidavit. This was almost exactly one year ago, in February of 2023. And so this former caseworker, Jamie Reed, she claimed that the clinic was pressuring kids into transitioning, that doctors are permanently harming them by allowing them to medically transition. Now, an internal investigation by the university found her allegations unsubstantiated, but she has stood by her story. Last month, Reed actually testified in favor of proposed bills restricting gender affirming care for kids. She insists that it is not compassionate to medically transition a child. Evan, you covered this very deeply. Tell us a bit of a summary of who is Jamie Reed, and why did her allegations create such an immediate impact?
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Vanessa: Well, Jamie Reed was a former, mostly front office staff member at this clinic, this very high reputation clinic that served transgender youth. And when I first came aware of her allegations, I didn't know anything about St. Louis Children's Hospital. I didn't know anything about the transgender center. So on the surface of it, her allegations seemed quite plausible and something to take very seriously. But it was actually the same day, I believe, that she went public with her essay in the Free Press that I wrote the first of many stories, sort of trying to provide context and clarity around these allegations. And the first thing that I noticed was just that a lot of her medical and scientific facts were just completely not correct. This isn't to say that she necessarily lied. I mean, she just may have been misinformed about a lot of the kind of basic science around pediatric transgender health care. It became clear that whatever this was, it wasn't really someone who was providing completely factual information in the affidavit. And then, of course, extensive reporting in Missouri and in the national press has sort of only deepened the picture of how inaccurate and misleading that affidavit was.
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Danny Wicentowski: You actually did a lot of original reporting after the Jamie Reed allegations were released. And I should note that Jamie Reed stands by her allegations. She has repeatedly said that she blew the whistle because she believed it to be correct. And despite a lot of the evidence that has come out later and that is what you were part of, you actually talked to patients, to families. What started becoming apparent as you talked to the people who had direct experience with this clinic in St. Louis?
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Vanessa: Well, I absolutely want to tell you about that, but I will just say that I have spoken via Twitter with Jamie Reed, and I did ask her directly about the one allegation that was shown to have been incorrect by one of the families who came forward. And I asked her, now, what she says is that that incorrect information actually originally came from a colleague. And so I asked her, why did you include information in your affidavit that you didn't know to be correct? And what she told me was that her concern was to draw attention to the practices of the center that she disagreed with. So while she has stood by her allegations in the sense that she has never admitted to having intentionally lied, and I wouldn't dream of accusing her of that, she is aware that there was false information in the affidavit, and she has told me that she didn't think that that was the most important thing, that the most important thing was drawing attention to the practices of the center that were lawful, that she disagreed with, but that were not necessarily against the law or indications of wrongdoing.
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Tony: Yeah.
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Danny Wicentowski: When you talked to the patients and the families to try to fact check what Jamie Reed is saying, what did you find?
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Vanessa: Yeah, there were families that were reaching out to me fairly early just because I was doing a lot of kind of basic fact checking of what are these allegations? How many of them have been confirmed? What does the science say? And so I think that gave people some trust to feel that they could reach out to me. And what I found out was that these were families who were devastated at having been included. Sometimes specifically, I talked to the family of a transgender girl, now woman, who was included in the affidavit because she had an adverse reaction to one of the medications. It's actually a little bit more complicated than that, but we don't need to go into the details. So both families that were specifically named and families that were more sort of generally named were devastated that this treatment that they found life changing for their children, that they were reliant on, that they were grateful to, and this center that they had really trusted, was being misrepresented, was being presented as if it was damaging their children when they knew that their children were thriving and their children were trans and that they had not in any know, felt angry at the transgender center or felt like they had been harmed, which was the opposite of what Jamie Reed was saying.
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Tony: I would like to actually jump in here now because I think that's a really important point. Whenever we imagine whistleblowers and we imagine the role of whistleblowers, it's to expose harm. And it's so critically important to recognize that none of the patients so far have come forward to state that they were harmed. We haven't had any allegations from people treated at that clinic that they were harmed. And in fact, many of those patients have had to flee the state of Missouri after laws were passed targeting their care. Whenever it comes to Jamie Reed in know, I think it's really important to recognize, and this was whenever I had first read the Jamie Reed story, I very clearly saw all of the hallmarks of all of the different sort of well coordinated anti trans campaigning that we've seen over the last three or four years that I've been following. And in an article that I wrote, I covered many of those hallmarks, misinformation and basic facts that were wrong about what care actually is. But also, I think it's extremely telling that the lawyer who Jamie Reed tapped to represent her was Vernadette Broyles, who heads the child and parental rights campaign. This is the same group that worked to pass the don't say gay legislation in Florida. This is the same person who is coordinated with several different organizations, like the Alliance Defending Freedom, who write the anti trans laws. And so it's hard to divorce the sort of claims of being a whistleblower from the very well coordinated political attacks on trans and queer people that we've seen over the last several years.
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Danny Wicentowski: We are talking today about the ways that Missouri's embrace of anti trans legislation is having an impact on the national stage. I'm here with journalist Aaron Reed, author of the Aaron in the Morning Newsletter, and Evan Urquhart, founder of Assigned Media. Aaron, you draw these connections of folks that are outside of the state who were helping Jamie Reed here. What was the impact in other states? If you could describe, to have this whistleblower in Missouri stand up and say trans care for kids is dangerous and I'm speaking out, did that have an impact around the country?
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Tony: Absolutely. Within days, if not weeks, we saw Jamie Reed's article cited in court briefings. We saw it cited in legislative hearings to ban care in other states. It very, very quickly was sort of handed off to all of the different Republicans in various states that were working on trying to ban care. And again, the way in which the information disseminates, the way in which we live in a system now to where these kinds of things can be said, and it takes longer to fact check them than it does for the legislators to pick them up and run with them, makes it so that we are very prone to moral panics. We are very prone to disinformation, driving negative legislation targeting trans people. And so, yeah, we saw that with the Jamie Reed story. It wasn't even strictly held within the United States. We saw it cited by people in the United Kingdom who were targeting care there. And again, the same networks that sort of amplify this stuff. We're talking about the alliance defending freedom, the Heritage Foundation, SEGM. These are groups that specifically are organized with this goal in mind. And just recently I reported on Representative Gary Clique in Ohio, who is the author of the trans ban in that state. And he, when talking to other Republicans, specifically said that the end goal, the end game was to ban care for everyone. That's the goal of all of this.
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Danny Wicentowski: And, Aaron, have you seen any kind of copycats or any other similar whistleblowers who have taken the Jamie Reed model in other states?
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Tony: They have attempted to bring out a couple more whistleblowers. One of them, I think, worked at a hospital in Washington state for maybe a few months in terms of working in the gender affirming care clinic there. And another one had allegedly released private and confidential information in Texas. Neither of those two have really caught on. Jamie Reed is the only one who they appear to be successfully getting into the information ecosystem.
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Danny Wicentowski: Now, I had a chance to actually speak with a patient at the Washington University clinic, and his name is Joey Borelli. And he said that Reed's descriptions just did not match with the clinic that he knew. When reading it, I'm kind of reeling thinking not a single one of these things is true. Would you talk to one trans person? It's baffling. It leaves me reeling, but it also makes me want to throw up because of the power that it has. That was Joey Borelli who spoke with me last year about being a patient at the Washington University Transgender center. That was in the wake of Jamie Reed writing that whistleblower report. Evan, the patients and folks that you spoke with, is that kind of what you heard, this sense of bafflement of, what was it that she was describing, but also a sense of how fearful this could be.
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Vanessa: Yeah. These were families who had been fighting against gender affirming care bans, you know, for, for quite a long time already. They were a fairly close knit group, many of them, who would go to the legislature and speak on behalf of their children. Sometimes their children would speak, and they really felt that they were able to make their voices heard and to get some empathy from the legislators. And there was just a feeling that all of that collapsed after the Jamie Reed allegations. And there was so much frustration and hurt that their stories were being overshadowed by this person who they knew because they'd been there, because this was treatment that they'd had and experienced. They knew it wasn't true, or at least it wasn't true to their experience at all. And I don't believe anyone has ever really found a patient or a parent who has substantiated the allegations of wrongdoing.
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Danny Wicentowski: Now, there is kind of an aftermath to what had happened at that specific clinic. And following the Missouri legislature banning care for transgender minors, both that clinic and another one in Missouri, they affirmatively decided to stop offering that care. The law had given some kind of grandfather clause. There was some space there. But we had two clinics essentially say even though the law doesn't force us specifically to close and to stop offering this care, there is a legal danger. Aaron, I'm wondering, what did that tell you about the impact of some of these laws? And is that something that other states are also pursuing?
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Tony: Yeah. And actually, I want to note that you specifically just noted what they cited. They cited the law. They cited the legal danger in the know whenever this bill was being debated in Missouri, they claimed that trans people would be grandfathered in to care, that they would, if you were already getting care before your care was not going to be interrupted. But all of the people that follow this legislation, myself included, knew that was a lie because there was a provision within the legislation that said that you could be sued for the rest of your life if you provided care. You did not have a statute of limitations. You did not even need to show negligence. So you could literally sue for any reason your doctor if they provided you care. And unfortunately, it's impossible to practice medicine under those constraints. No doctor is going to do it because no liability insurer is going to provide you with malpractice insurance. You don't even have to show malpractice under the Missouri law. And so to give your listeners an example of what this would a comparison to this, imagine, if you will that tomorrow we decided that knee surgery, if you regret your knee surgery 20 years from now, and you had to get your knee surgery replaced 20 years from now, which knee surgeries need to be replaced. Sometimes you could sue your doctor 20 years from now. It doesn't even matter if they did the care perfectly. No doctor would do it. No surgeon would be able to actually do knee surgery. And so that's what they did. They did this specifically because they knew that they could backdoor a ban that way. And in fact, since we're talking about Missouri being a sort of leader in this kind of legislation, this legislation was then used in other states. And now we're seeing in a place like New Hampshire, that these liability laws are not only targeting youth, they're targeting trans people at any age. And if they pass, it would essentially be a backdoor ban on all trans care. The perfect analog to this is the target restrictions on abortion providers laws, the trap laws that many of your listeners are going to understand and remember. These are bills that stated that a hospital had to have admitting or an abortion clinic had to have admitting privileges at a hospital, or that an abortion clinic had to have extremely high malpractice insurance rates. And what that does is it doesn't outright ban abortion, sure, but it does make it to where nobody can actually practice it. And we saw that in Missouri, just like we're seeing it around the country right now.
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Elaine Cha: We need to take a quick break, but we'll be back shortly to continue our conversation with trans journalists Erin Reed and Evan Urquhart. This is St. Louis on the air on St. Louis public Radio. Welcome back. I'm Elaine Cha. Let's return to St. Louis on the air producer Danny Wicentowski's conversation with trans journalists Erin Reed and Evan Urquhart.
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Danny Wicentowski: Erin, you manage a map on your website and your newsletter that shows states based on the intensity of their anti trans laws, the degree to which things are unsafe for trans people living there, you do not rank Missouri as the worst state or the most danger. That's for Florida, from my understanding. But it is one that you rate at high risk for the next two years. Why is.
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Tony: I have actually, it's actually two maps. One of them is for adults and one of them is for trans youth. For trans youth, Missouri is listed as one of the states with the worst laws passed for trans adults. It is not yet at that level. Florida is the worst currently because they are saying that if you are, quote unquote, misrepresenting your driver's license gender for instance, you could be charged with criminal fraud, or if you're found in a bathroom that doesn't match your gender identity, or you're assigned sex at birth, you could be thrown in jail for up to a year under criminal trespassing laws. So Florida is a very difficult place to be in right now. Missouri is tough. Missouri is extremely tough, especially for trans youth, with the bills that ban their care. But Missouri still has a little ways to go. They can still do more, and, in fact, legislators are looking at doing more in Missouri. Very recently, we heard bills in Missouri that completely struck that grandfather clause out. For example, there's also a bill in Missouri that passed committee that would allow for healthcare practitioners to legally discriminate against LGBTQ people, and specifically trans people. So we heard in that hearing that if I as a trans person went to a clinic in Missouri as an adult and my doctor signed off on care, and the nurse signed off on care, and I went through all of the steps, and then I went to the pharmacist, and even the pharmacists signed off on care, but the cashier was religious and didn't believe that I deserved to get my care. That cashier could mix. The entire process could say, nope, I'm not going to sell you your hormones. And so that's what this law would do. These are the kinds of laws that make it very hard to navigate society because the rules keep changing for trans people.
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Danny Wicentowski: Aaron, you spent many, many hours live tweeting a January 17 Missouri House and Senate committee hearings that went very late into the night. You talked about these new bills, one that would allow pharmacists, desk workers, nurses, and more to discriminate against trans people. What else stood out to you from that marathon hearing?
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Tony: I'm glad that you mentioned that it was a marathon hearing, because it was. It was one of the longer ones that I've covered. And, in fact, there were nine bills heard in a single day, which is the most from all of my hundreds of hours of tracking these bills. It's the most bills that have been heard in a single day targeting trans people in a single state. And these bills ranged from, as you mentioned, the legal right to discriminate against trans people in medical care to bills that would forcibly out trans students to their parents, ban trans people from bathrooms. We even saw one bill that would essentially say that the Missouri Commission on human Rights had to target trans people in bathrooms, basically stating that trans people in a bathroom are a violation of the rights of cisgender. You know, it was hard. It was hard to listen to. It was hard to watch, and I have to because this is my job. I report on these bills. But we saw that barely anybody came up to speak in favor of this legislation, and yet they still advanced a good bit of it. They combined some of the bills, they pushed it forward, and the other bills are still alive. They're still sitting there and could come out at any moment. And so, yeah, that was a long hearing.
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Vanessa: I'd like to jump in just for a moment to talk about some of this legislation that's proposed, legislation that's debated. And I think often people think, well, it's not going to pass or it's not that likely to pass. So why is it important to talk about it, and why is it important to monitor it the way Aaron does? And the reason is that last year or two years ago was way too far right, was the absolute fringe. No one would do it. Trans people have been hearing for years that no one was going to ban gender affirming care, that no one was going to come after gender affirming care for adults. So the proposed legislation this year know, very plausibly the legislation that passes next year. And I do think Aaron's work is so important in tracking know, both of.
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Danny Wicentowski: Your points involve the subject of what is gender affirming care and how is it communicated by political parties, by organizations. Evan, you have done a lot of writing about trying to address misconceptions, trying to address propaganda, as you mentioned. And you actually had a recent piece titled your bad faith questions about gender identity answered. And this was actually a response to a letter in the St. Louis Post Dispatch from someone who was raising questions, as you mentioned, in sort of a bad faith way. And I'm wondering, could you describe, how do you know with a question of, like, how is gender dysphoria diagnosed? And this was a question you kind of unpacked in your piece. How do you know when someone's coming at this with bad faith? And why is gender affirming care attracting this type of energy?
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Vanessa: Right. Something that is very common among people who are either opposed to transgender rights or who are very severely skeptical of trans people's right to be who we are. They often present questions as if they are unanswerable, and they kind of trust that the invisibility of trans people and the inability of trans people to kind of have an equal microphone will cement in the public's mind the idea that, for example, that gender dysphoria in youth is self diagnosed. Now, it is not self diagnosed. It's sort of like a headache. If you go to your doctor and you have a headache, they're going to ask you some questions, and they may diagnose a migraine, but it isn't you self diagnosing migraine. It is you reporting on what's going on in terms of how much pain you're feeling in your head. So gender dysphoria is a little bit like that. There are questions that professional asks, and it does have to do with how the trans person, and if it's a young person, how the young trans person is feeling and thinking about their body and about gender, but it's not that child diagnosing themselves. Another one of the questions that I called bad faith was, is gender dysphoria simply an unwillingness to conform to gender stereotypes? Now, that's a question that's implying that it is and is kind of relying on the fact that there's no one there to answer and to say, well, as a matter of fact, trans people are very likely not to be very strictly gender conforming after they transition. There are a lot of trans men who are gay men, and there are a lot of trans men who are not deeply macho, deeply, perhaps, myself included, kind of doubling down on macho stereotypes. And the same, of course, is true for trans women, who often break stereotypes in many ways. But so by asking the question, is that what gender dysphoria is? It's sort of implying that the answer is yes, and the answer is actually no. I like to do a lot of that, kind of just letting people know that there is an answer and that the kind of stereotype, I think, often is that trans people are sort of irrational or kind of unable to answer these basic questions. And so just kind of breaking it down and saying, no. These are the answers, I hope, is something that can kind of dispel that in people's mind.
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Tony: And that would be bad enough if that were it. But we're seeing even further now. We're seeing people with very large platforms, essentially not only just ask the questions and assume that no trans person is going to be able to have the platform to answer them, but also they're going to go and find the one cherry picked person who meets their criteria, who meets their definition. We have this know very recently in the New York Times with the Pamela Paul article, where Pamela Paul said that, oh, well, trans people are really just gay people. That transition is transing away the gay or something like that. And we saw that she found one person who said that they were just internally repressed and gay. And yet, whenever you look at the community, whenever you look at the trans community, by and large, something like 80% of us identify as LG or B after transition as well. And so it lifts up that point that Evan just made, that essentially, so much of this relies on the idea that we, as trans people, often do not have these platforms to be able to answer back. We don't have the New York Times. We don't have big columns that we can constantly write out on. And that's why Evan and I do the work that we do. We're here able to actually report on these.
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Danny Wicentowski: Know, I wanted to ask both of you, as journalists who are trans, who are covering this issue that involves laws that if you were living in Missouri, might very much directly affect your life and your own medical care. If you could just tell us a bit of what this is like for you as journalists and how you maintain that professionalism and that energy, even while these laws and these figures are talking about things that are really, really personal.
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Tony: Yeah, this is the hardest but most important job that I've ever had. And I think that I recognize that every day there are places right now that are unsafe for me to travel to. I was invited to go speak at a college in Florida, the new college of Florida, which, by the way, was taken over by a De Santis handpicked person. And I know that if I had gone to the bathroom there, easily, somebody could target me. And it's hard to be able to report on these bills. It's hard to be able to write on these topics while also knowing that you could be next. You could be targeted next. And I'm in a relatively safe place. I'm in Maryland, and Maryland has taken steps to protect trans people. And I want to be clear that there are many states right now that are going in the opposite direction, that are taking steps to protect trans people in their borders. But as it stands right now, I have to answer these questions from trans people in Missouri who ask me, am I safe here? Is it safe to stay here? And I have to tell them the truth. I don't know. There are ways that you can be targeted right now in many of these states that can last a lifetime. And so, yeah, it's difficult, but it's important.
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Vanessa: I would say that being a journalist is sort of the great passion of my life. And I have always just believed so strongly in truth as a fix, as a spur towards good actions, towards good policy, towards understanding one another. And so I do see it as just the greatest privilege to be able to do journalism, to be able to bring people real information, particularly people in my community, the trans community, but the mainstream as well. When I get that chance. Is it hard? In some ways, yes. But I would also say that it's harder to feel like you don't have anything you can do. And so I have something I can do. I have my job. I go out, I report every know that that's a great privilege and something that I value. Very.
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Danny Wicentowski: Guess. Lastly, you know, looking at Missouri in this next year, from what you've know, is Missouri going to be leading this trend yet again, or is there another state that we should be looking at to wonder is Missouri going to look like this in a know?
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Tony: I think that Missouri is going to continue to be one of the first to do things, and I have not seen any indication that that is going to slow down. Other states like Florida, Texas, have also sort of taken that front step, the first step to do things. And my eyes are on Missouri. I know that Attorney General Andrew Bailey has repeatedly targeted the community. Right now, he very recently signed on to a letter stating that he should be able to go after people who are getting gender affirming care in other states. So people who are leaving Missouri to go get care, as if he has some sort of ownership over Missouri, citizens who are traveling to other states. And so, yeah, I think that Missouri is absolutely going to be one of the states that we need to continue to watch. And I also want to state that we've been talking a lot about trans people, but these same rulings, these same policies are targeted against other people as well, people that are seeking abortions, immigrants. We see that this is not going to be limited just to us. And I think that we need to watch Missouri for more than one reason because of that.
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Danny Wicentowski: Erin Reed is a trans journalist who tracks legislation around the US in her subscription newsletter, Erin in the morning. She has covered Missouri's legislation numerous times, and she recently published a column in the Guardian titled Missouri is Ground Zero for the fire hose of anti trans legislation. Aaron, thank you so much for being with us today.
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Tony: Thank you so much for having me.
[00:38:23]
Danny Wicentowski: And Evan Urquhart is the founder of Assigned Media, a news site dedicated to daily coverage of anti-trans propaganda and its effects. He covered the Jamie Reed case very deeply in the last year, and he recently wrote on January 23, a piece responding to a letter published in the Post Dispatch titled your bad faith questions about gender identity answered. Evan, thank you so much for being here today.
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Vanessa: Thank you.
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Elaine Cha: This episode was produced by Danny Wicentowski.
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Danny Wicentowski: Audio engineering and podcast design by Aaron Doerr. Our executive producer is Alex Heuer.
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Danny Wicentowski: St. Louis on the air is a production of St. Louis Public Radio. Understanding starts here. St. Louis on the air proudly supports local artists by using music from Life Creative group.
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Elaine Cha: Do you find yourself regularly listening to episodes of St. Louis on the air? Suggest us to a friend you think might enjoy our conversations and leave us a review and rating on Apple Podcasts on the App Store. It's the simplest way to help people discover our show. Thank you.
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Danny Wicentowski: St. Louis Public Radio is a member supported service of the University of Missouri St. Louis. St. Louis Public Radio is the gate way gives you the day's news first thing every weekday morning, from the ever evolving relationship between St. Louis City and county to developments in the Missouri and Illinois state capitals, and reports from our correspondents in Rala and the Metro east. We put it all in a roughly ten minute package with clarity and context. Download the gateway wherever you get podcasts.
Stunning and Valid
Feels like a lifetime ago.