Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey has launched an investigation into the Washington University Pediatric Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital after a former employee went public with a story that may turn the tide against the treatment of minors with gender dysphoria.
A former clinic employee, Jamie Reed, has blown the whistle on the clinic, alleging hospital employees at the transgender center of lying to the parents of patients, among many other issues.
Reed tells her story in The Free Press, knowing full well the pushback she will get and how some on the right and left will misuse her story for an agenda she doesn’t agree with.
“I Thought I Was Saving Trans Kids. Now I’m Blowing the Whistle,” she titles her article. “There are more than 100 pediatric gender clinics across the U.S. I worked at one. What’s happening to children is morally and medically appalling.”
I have been writing for years about these clinics sprouting up like prairie grass across the country. Some of them are associated with respected hospitals and clinics like the Washington University Hospital system. But many are standalone clinics with dubious treatment regimens. They are barely regulated in that there are no specific guidelines for running these clinics.
And, as you’ll see, just because the clinics are associated with a prestigious hospital doesn’t mean they know what they’re doing.
Reed describes herself as a “queer woman and politically to the left of Bernie Sanders.” She was a caseworker at the gender clinic for four years and what she saw during that time shocked and frightened her.
I left the clinic in November of last year because I could no longer participate in what was happening there. By the time I departed, I was certain that the way the American medical system is treating these patients is the opposite of the promise we make to “do no harm.” Instead, we are permanently harming the vulnerable patients in our care.
Until about eight years ago, the patient population of teens suffering from gender dysphoria was made up of a few young boys who wanted to “present” as girls. But then, something strange happened.
Until 2015 or so, a very small number of these boys comprised the population of pediatric gender dysphoria cases. Then, across the Western world, there began to be a dramatic increase in a new population: Teenage girls, many with no previous history of gender distress, suddenly declared they were transgender and demanded immediate treatment with testosterone.
I certainly saw this at the center. One of my jobs was to do intake for new patients and their families. When I started there were probably 10 such calls a month. When I left there were 50, and about 70 percent of the new patients were girls. Sometimes clusters of girls arrived from the same high school.
Reed noticed that many of these teenage girls suffered from “comorbidities” like depression, anxiety, ADHD, eating disorders, and obesity. Many were diagnosed with autism. A British pediatric transgender center conducted a study last year and found that about one-third of the patients referred there were on the autism spectrum.
Many of the patients claimed they had conditions and diseases they clearly didn’t have, like Tourette Syndrome or multiple personalities.
All these self-diagnoses point to social contagion. But the doctors at Washington University Gender Clinic refused to recognize transgender claims as social contagion. They called it “innate.”
To begin transitioning, the girls needed a letter of support from a therapist—usually one we recommended—who they had to see only once or twice for the green light. To make it more efficient for the therapists, we offered them a template for how to write a letter in support of transition. The next stop was a single visit to the endocrinologist for a testosterone prescription.
That’s all it took.
One of the major side effects of testosterone is sterility. Reed didn’t believe the teenage girls fully grasped what that meant. She also didn’t think the girls understood the impact of other effects of testosterone on their bodies.
Many encounters with patients emphasized to me how little these young people understood the profound impacts changing gender would have on their bodies and minds. But the center downplayed the negative consequences, and emphasized the need for transition. As the center’s website said, “Left untreated, gender dysphoria has any number of consequences, from self-harm to suicide. But when you take away the gender dysphoria by allowing a child to be who he or she is, we’re noticing that goes away. The studies we have show these kids often wind up functioning psychosocially as well as or better than their peers.”
Reed relates stories of severely mentally disturbed adolescents being sent to the gender clinic with diagnoses like schizophrenia, PTSD, bipolar disorder, and more. The doctors’ solution? Gender transition.
Finally, the issue of parental consent is given short shrift by the doctors at the clinic. Reed relates one story of a mother who brought her daughter to the clinic. The woman was divorcing her husband and she wanted custody so her daughter could undergo a gender transition.
I had done the original intake call, and I found the mother quite disturbing. She and the father were getting divorced, and the mother described the daughter as “kind of a tomboy.” So now the mother was convinced her child was trans. But when I asked if her daughter had adopted a boy’s name, if she was distressed about her body, if she was saying she felt like a boy, the mother said no. I explained the girl just didn’t meet the criteria for an evaluation.
Then a month later, the mother called back and said her daughter now used a boy’s name, was in distress over her body, and wanted to transition. This time the mom and daughter were given an appointment. Our providers decided the girl was trans and prescribed a puberty blocker to prevent her normal development.
I don’t deny the existence of gender dysphoria. For those who genuinely suffer from the condition, it’s horrible to see. But I also know that gender dysphoria is extremely rare and that a minor shouldn’t be subjected to any treatment that alters their sex. If they want to change who they are after reaching the age of consent, they should be allowed to do so.
Just because a girl likes to play sports or a boy likes to play with dolls doesn’t make them candidates for gender transition. But there are powerful forces at work to undermine the very nature of gender and they must be stopped before they destroy the lives of untold thousands of children.
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