By Grace Mayer
June 11, 2026
Introduction:
Read more here: https://progressive.org/magazine/fight ... 260611/(The Progressive) On 2023, as Missouri legislators inched closer to passing a ban on gender-affirming care for minors, Michael Walk, whose daughter is transgender, began making plans.
Alongside his family, the St. Louis TransParent chapter co-leader came up with four different scenarios for how his daughter, who was seventeen at the time, could continue to receive gender-affirming care. The ban in Missouri included an exception that would allow patients who started hormones and puberty blockers prior to August 2023 to continue that care. While Walk’s daughter qualified, they struggled to find willing local providers.
Plan A was simple—hope the law failed to pass, and that the Walks could continue accessing gender-affirming care in Missouri and living in the state. Plans B and C included staying in Missouri and making regular drives to the nearest clinic that offered gender-affirming care in Fairview Heights, Illinois, or, if that clinic wasn’t accepting new patients, a hospital farther away in Chicago. Plan D, the most costly, was to relocate to San Diego, California, where Walk’s daughter could continue receiving care and finish high school.
Stopping gender-affirming care wasn’t an option for Walk’s daughter, who struggled with prolonged bouts of depression prior to starting testosterone blockers in 2021, followed by estrogen treatments in 2022. Walk’s family was ultimately able to go with Plan B; the Missouri ban passed and was signed into law in June 2023, but the clinic in Fairview Heights took Walk’s daughter as a patient.
Since then, a slew of new state and federal legislation targeting gender-affirming care and transgender individuals have left Walk and his family continuing to plan contingencies for an uncertain future. While his daughter was in the process of choosing a college, she had to make sure the school was in a state where she would feel comfortable and safe in her identity, and where protections for transgender people were in place. She ruled out Missouri early on, and landed at a school in New York.
