Kudos to The Free Press and whistleblower Jamie Reed for exposing the horrors of the pediatric gender industry.
Reed — a leftist and self-identified queer woman married to a trans man — worked for years as a case manager at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. She took the job to help serve a marginalized group. But what happened on the job defies explanation, and violates the major tenet of the Hippocratic Oath: First do no harm.
Shocker No. 1: The center had no formal treatment protocols; its co-directors made life-changing decisions on an ad-hoc basis basically by whim. And the rest of what Reed saw over her career there was much worse.
Like an explosion in the number of intake calls, with the vast majority being for girls, often in groups from the same school and sometimes coming in with imaginary self-diagnosis of Tourette’s and other neurological conditions.
Per Reed, the doctors at the clinic knew these neurological self-diagnoses were examples of social contagion — but refused to admit the same might be possible of self-diagnosed gender dysmorphia.
And all it took to get these kids on hormones was one letter from a therapist plus a single medical consultation. Those hormones have potentially life-altering and irreversible consequences, including sterility, liver toxicity and severe sexual issues.
Worse yet, intakes came in from a mental-health unit at the hospital. Yes, kids with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder were put on hormones as a cure for their mental illness (including one patient who compulsively sexually abused dogs).
Parental rights? Blatantly, routinely disregarded. Reed cites a case of a young tomboy whose mother, mid-divorce, decided her daughter was trans with zero evidence and got her on a puberty blocker via the clinic. The father fought and lost a court battle to stop it.
Reed was also on the front lines of a phenomenon gender extremists claim doesn’t matter: detransitioning, i.e. when people who’ve transitioned want to go back. One doctor she worked with callously refused to pay any mind to the detransitioners, patients he’d formerly cared for. She also cites a teen girl who heartbreakingly told a nurse, “I want my breasts back.”
Internally, Reed raised the obvious ethical concerns — until she got called on the carpet at a staff retreat and told (in just so many word) to “get on board, or get out.”
That’s precisely the attitude that governs gender extremism in US pediatric medicine (no matter that the rest of the developed world has more or less decided to stop giving kids hormones). If you’re uncomfortable with the idea of children being fast-tracked into a medical regime that will damage them permanently, often against the wishes of their parents, you’re a hateful bigot.
How many more kids must suffer before we see real change?