Rene Freels and her husband have a fund going now. It’s for leaving the country with their daughter, if they ever decide they have to.
The St. Louis-area couple talked about moving but chose to save instead, Freels told the Missouri Independent this month. Their neighborhood used to feel far from politics, she said. Now there are Yes on 3 signs at the church down the street. Their daughter, Chelsea, 20, got puberty blockers as a minor in Missouri. She’s warier now about visiting home, her mother said.
“Us parents are trying to end this so that when we pass away, our kids don’t have to deal with this type of discrimination, this vile discrimination, so that they just can live their lives free and have free movement,” Rene Freels said.
Amendment 3 is one yes-or-no question on the Nov. 3 ballot. A yes vote repeals the abortion-rights amendment Missouri voters passed in 2024 and allows a ban on most abortions again. It also adds the item that the Missouri Secretary of State’s official ballot title lists last: “Prohibit gender transition procedures for minors.”
The amendment’s full text spells it out. “No gender transition surgeries shall be knowingly performed on children under eighteen years of age,” it says, and no “cross-sex hormones or puberty-blocking drugs shall be knowingly prescribed or administered for the purpose of gender transition” to minors. There are two exceptions. One covers kids born with a “medically verifiable disorder of sex development.” The other covers treating an infection, injury, disease or disorder that has nothing to do with transition. The trans provision doesn’t reach anyone 18 or older.
No state has a gender-affirming care ban in its constitution yet. Missouri would be the first, the Independent reported. The 26 other states with bans wrote them into ordinary law. Missouri is also one of five states with trans-related measures on the ballot this year.
Why Her Health, Her Future Leads With Trans Youth Care
Missouri already bans this care for minors. The SAFE Act, passed in 2023, permanently bars gender transition surgery for anyone under 18. It also stops minors from starting puberty blockers or hormones. That second part runs out in August 2027. The Missouri Supreme Court upheld the law unanimously in January.
Supporters keep pointing to that date. “We do not want to leave the protections for children to the winds of the political change of whoever is in office in the legislature and courts,” Amanda Sanders, a spokesperson for Her Health, Her Future, told the Independent.
“We’re not anti-anyone,” Sanders said. “This is pro-protecting their childhood, their innocence.”
Sam Lee, director of Campaign Life Missouri, made the same pitch to St. Louis Public Radio. “They don’t have to worry about what those politicians are going to be up to in Jefferson City between now and August of next year,” he said.
Jamie Reed appears in one of the yes campaign’s TV ads. She used to work as a caseworker at the Washington University Transgender Center in St. Louis, and in 2023 she accused the clinic of rushing kids into treatment. Families whose children got care there have disputed her account. Reed spoke to a Republican crowd in St. Louis County in September. “If we talk to people about the trans part of this amendment,” Reed said, “we can get it to pass.”
Her Health, Her Future’s first TV ad opens with the line “It starts with drag queen story hour and ends with children under the knife.” After viewers asked, Springfield’s KY3 checked whether these surgeries happen in Missouri schools. The state education department called that “not true.” James Lawson, an adviser to the campaign, told the station the ad makes no claim about schools.
Former House Speaker Tim Jones, who supports the amendment, defended that approach to St. Louis Public Radio. “Everybody knows Amendment 3 deals with abortion,” Jones said. “I don’t know if folks know if it definitely will address the transgender issue or not. So, I think that’s why folks lead with that too.”
How HJR 73 Reached the Ballot and Why the 2027 Sunset Survived
Rep. Ed Lewis, R-Moberly, sponsored the measure as House Joint Resolution 73. Senate Republicans cut off a Democratic filibuster on May 14, 2025, with a rarely used move called the “previous question,” then passed it 21-11, St. Louis Public Radio reported. Republican Sen. Adam Schnelting carried it there.
Rep. Brian Seitz, R-Branson, helped handle it in the House. “This legislation was very clear in that the abortion issue deals with reproductive health care,” he told St. Louis Public Radio a month later. “We made sure that this was placed on the ballot and that they are together.”
Rep. Elizabeth Fuchs, D-St. Louis, joined protesters outside the Senate chamber the day it passed. “I want people to really understand that this is an attempt to erase trans people from society,” she said.
The sunset in the 2023 law came out of a deal. Katy Erker-Lynch, executive director of the LGBTQ+ group PROMO, said in 2025 that the group would “fight to keep that sunset in place because it was a bipartisan agreement.”
The Missouri House tried to scrap it anyway. HB 2033, from Rep. Melissa Schmidt, R-Elridge, passed 102-40 in February, St. Louis Public Radio reported. It cleared a Senate committee in April and never got a final Senate vote, according to the bill record.
During that debate, Rep. Wick Thomas, a Kansas City Democrat who is transgender and nonbinary, addressed the bill’s backers directly. “Just know, I was one of you. And I never had any concerns. I never had any shame around who I was,” Thomas said. “What affected my mental health was the rhetoric coming out of rooms like this.”
The 2023 law let kids who were already on blockers or hormones keep getting them, the Associated Press reported.
Opponents say the trans provision is there to carry the abortion ban. “The facts are that healthcare for transgender youth is already banned in Missouri and it will remain banned no matter how people vote,” said Tom Bastian, a spokesperson for No on 3 Stop the Ban. Rep. Keri Ingle, D-Lee’s Summit, told St. Louis Public Radio she sees a strategy. “And they knew that they would not be able to go back to their trigger ban or to just let the abortion issue stand on its own,” Ingle said. “And so they had to marry these two issues together in order to sow fear and distrust in Missourians to get them to ban what they had just voted for.”
Missouri Trans Youth and Parents Already Drive to Illinois for Care
In September 2023, Washington University’s Transgender Center stopped giving blockers and hormones to minors, even to kids the law exempted. Its statement said the law “creates unsustainable liability for health-care professionals,” St. Louis Public Radio reported.
Planned Parenthood Great Rivers, part of the Stop the Ban coalition, offers hormone therapy to patients 16 and older, and 16- and 17-year-olds have to bring a parent or guardian. Missouri minors who want to start it get booked at the affiliate’s clinic in Fairview Heights, Illinois, according to Planned Parenthood Great Rivers.
Under the 2023 law, Kelly Storck’s minor clients have to go to Chicago or farther for medical treatment, said Storck, a St. Louis-area therapist who focuses on gender care. “It keeps people quiet. It keeps people hidden,” she told the Independent.
Katie Heiden-Rootes, a Saint Louis University family therapist who works with trans young people and their families, said clients have told her the election-year spotlight is costing them sleep and making work and parenting harder. “It stokes fear and hatred towards a group of people who really just want to live and be seen as full humans in the state of Missouri,” she said.
Michael Walk co-leads the St. Louis chapter of TransParent, a support group for parents of trans kids. “They’re trying to have everything that they want, and with certain communities they’ll try to sell it as the abortion ban, and with certain communities they’ll try to sell it as the trans ban, and sometimes they’ll try to sell it as both,” Walk told St. Louis Public Radio. Walk worries the care could stay out of reach for a long time. “I’m concerned that it could be off limits to them for years and years to come,” Walk said.
In 2024, Chelsea Freels went door to door around the state for the abortion-rights amendment. This summer she spotted Yes on 3 signs during a drive to her grandmother’s place at the Lake of the Ozarks. “Ban transgender surgeries for minors,” they said.
“It’s really telling that the Republicans have shifted a lot of their messaging about A3 away from abortion,” she said. “And towards demonizing children.”
PROMO’s Deep Canvassers Knock on Doors in St. Louis County
PROMO has trans Missourians knocking on doors. Reneé Luckfield, 29, a trans woman, leads the group’s St. Louis canvass. “Honestly, it’s not something that I’m entirely comfortable with,” she told KFF Health News, in a story NPR published Oct. 29. “And it’s not fair that we have to do this work.”
PROMO, a member of the Stop the Ban coalition, wants to knock on 100,000 doors across five metro areas and have 10,000 conversations by Election Day.
Louis Meyer had told an earlier PROMO canvasser he was torn on care for trans minors. When Luckfield knocked in late September, he said he was against both bans, and he explained why. “The original question was about where my morals sit and what I would do, which is a different statement than what I want the government to dictate,” Meyer said.
“People are more accepting than they think the people around them are,” Luckfield said.
An August poll found a close race. A Saint Louis University/YouGov poll taken Aug. 13-24 had 43% for Amendment 3, 44% against and 13% unsure. That’s inside the poll’s margin of error. Back in March, poll director Steve Rogers told St. Louis Public Radio that undecided voters’ views on gender-affirming care made them look “a lot more like the people supporting the amendment than the people who are opposing it.”
Stop the Ban had raised more than $25.7 million by mid-October, and Her Health, Her Future had raised $5.3 million, the Independent reported from Missouri Ethics Commission filings. The Fairness Project, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit, has given Stop the Ban nearly $12 million. “The real concern is outside money attempting to influence Missouri’s constitution,” Lawson, the yes campaign’s adviser, told the Independent.
Polls are open 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 3, according to the Missouri Secretary of State. Voters can still cast an absentee ballot in person at their local election office until 5 p.m. Monday, Nov. 2.
