Missouri House lawmakers voted to change the women’s dress code on Wednesday, sparking outrage from Democrats and several legacy media reports that looked to imply there was sexism at play, even though the new code ended up looking surprisingly similar to the previous dress code.

Republican state Representative Ann Kelley pushed for the changes, saying that the dress code needed to be clarified.

“Isn’t it is essential to always maintain a formal and professional atmosphere on the House floor?” Kelley asked. “And to ensure this happens, I have felt compelled to offer this amendment, which cleans up some of the language in rule 98 by mirroring the previous language and the gentleman’s dress code.”

“Men are required to wear a jacket, a shirt and a tie, correct? And if they walked in here without a tie, they would get gaveled down in a heartbeat. If they walked in without a jacket, they would get gaveled down in a heartbeat. So, we are so interested in being equal,” Kelley also noted.

“All we’re trying to do today is to take the same rules that we have and make them more clear,” Republican state Representative Brenda Shields said.

The previous dress code from 2021 states that “[p]roper attire for women shall be dresses or skirts or slacks worn with a blazer or sweater and appropriate dress shoes or boots. This rule shall apply to all members and staff on the floor of the House and lower gallery.”

For men, it says that “proper attire for gentlemen shall be business attire, including coat, tie, dress trousers, and dress shoes or boots.”

The dress code amendment was approved in a voice vote. A rules package with the new dress code then passed on Wednesday in a vote of 105-51.

One dress code amendment stated that “[p]roper attire for women shall be business attire, including jackets worn with dresses, skirts, or slacks, and dress shoes or boots. For the purposes of this rule, ‘jacket’ shall include blazers and knit blazers.”

The word “cardigan” was also added after the word “blazers” in an amendment by Shields as people reportedly pushed back on the rule change.

Democrats, in particular, voiced their concerns on the House floor.

“We are fighting — again — for a woman’s right to choose for something. This time, it’s how she covers herself — and the interpretation of someone who has no background in fashion,” Democratic state Representative Raychel Proudie argued during a speech. “I spent $1,200 on a suit, and I can’t wear it in the People’s House because someone who doesn’t have the range tells me that it’s inappropriate.”

Proudie also said that some coworkers might be pregnant and would have to spend money on new attire to be in line with the rule.

“We are a place of laws and words do matter,” Proudie said. “This is a place where we ought to be dressed in business formal, which does call for women to have our arms covered. I think we’re being quite pedantic here by making rules so petty and what it will ultimately lead to is the disenfranchisement of folks.”

“You surely don’t have the money off the salary that we make to go buy a bunch of new clothes or tailored clothes, and I hope you’re able to continue to wear your cardigan and vote on behalf of the people who sent you here,” Proudie said.

Democratic State Representative Ashley Aune also pushed back, saying, “Do you know what it feels like to have a bunch of men in this room looking at your top trying to decide whether it’s appropriate or not?”

Kelley, in favor of the change, questioned why they were discussing the matter on the House floor at all.

“You would think, you would think, that all you would have to do is, say, dress professionally, and women could handle it,” Kelley responded. “You would think elected officials could handle that.”

A new study found that even the “best” evidence for pediatric medical transition is of extremely low quality and should not be relied upon as justification for medically transitioning minors.

A peer-reviewed paper published last week critically analyzed the “gold standard” evidence in support of medically transitioning trans-identified children, known as the “Dutch studies,” and found it has “profound, previously unrecognized problems,” and requires “urgent attention from the medical community,” according to the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine (SEGM), an international group of over 100 clinicians and researchers.

“These problems range from erroneously concluding that gender dysphoria disappeared as a result of ‘gender-affirmative treatment,’ to reporting only the best-case scenario outcomes and failing to properly examine the risks, despite the fact that a significant proportion of the treated sample experienced adverse effects,” said SEGM. (emphasis theirs).

The paper, titled “The Myth of Reliable Research in Pediatric Gender Medicine,” focuses on the two Dutch studies and the resulting “Dutch protocol” that inspired the “gender-affirming” model of care now used worldwide. The Dutch protocol was often considered the more cautious, conservative approach to the radical “affirming” method, but all justification for even carefully selecting minor candidates to medically transition falls apart upon closer inspection.

According to the authors of the paper, the Dutch protocol — which used hormones and surgeries to give minors the appearance of secondary sex characteristics of the opposite sex — would never have been accepted by today’s standards of evidence-based medicine because of its extremely low-quality research and harm caused to some of its participants.

The three clinicians who began medically transitioning gender dysphoric adolescents in Amsterdam practiced in the 1980s and 1990s, before medicine became an established “evidence-based” practice, and relied heavily on “expert opinion.”

The reason why this protocol became the foundation toward “gender-affirming care,” the authors explain, is through a phenomenon called “runaway diffusion,” where the medical community mistakes a small experiment as proven practice. The damage done by “runaway diffusion” can be mitigated by conducting systematic reviews of the evidence and implementing “practice reversal,” as Finland, Sweden, England, and recently the state of Florida have done, the authors note.

The authors of the paper charge that the results of the Dutch studies relied heavily on cherry-picking the participants who had positive or neutral outcomes, while excluding the participants with negative outcomes, to give the illusion of an overall positive result. Another methodological flaw noted by the authors found that the originally stated intention of the Dutch studies was to investigate whether or not the treatment “improved psychological functioning,” but when their research failed to show benefits, the goalpost was moved to a measure of “satisfaction with treatment.”

“The Dutch studies reported only the best-case scenario outcomes while ignoring the serious risks that emerged; wrongly concluded that gender dysphoria ‘disappeared’ post-treatment; and failed to separate the effects of psychotherapy from those of blockers, hormones and surgery,” SEGM summarized in a tweet.

The authors address the many newer short-term studies that have been published since the Dutch research, all of which “perfected the art of spin — misrepresenting weak, uncertain, or even negative findings as strong and positive,” said SEGM. They also note the unprofessional level of political activism demonstrated by gender-clinicians, many of whom try to quash scientific debate by dismissing it as “science denialism” motivated by “transphobia.”

“The key problem in pediatric gender medicine is not the lack of research rigor in the past—it is the field’s present-day denial of the profound problems in the existing research, and an unwillingness to engage in high quality research requisite in evidence-based medicine,” the authors of the paper said.

Leor Sapir, a Manhattan Institute fellow, shared a summary of the paper to his followers on Twitter, explaining its significance, given that the Dutch studies are often cited as the “best available evidence” in guidelines for treating gender dysphoric youth by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the Endocrine Society, and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

“The new article is therefore hugely significant, as it goes to the heart of the entire pediatric medical transition enterprise,” said Sapir. “It explains in detail why the Dutch studies are fatally flawed and anyway inapplicable to the current clinical scene.”