The Patriot Post® · 'What's Happening to Children Is Morally and Medically Appalling'

We’ve written at length about the transgender issue generally, and about the danger to children specifically. Our position is well researched and well established. Even so, when someone from the other side boldly agrees, we take note.

“I am a 42-year-old St. Louis native, a queer woman, and politically to the left of Bernie Sanders,” begins Jamie Reed in an op-ed for The Free Press, a publication started by New York Times refugee Bari Weiss. “Through childhood and adolescence, I did a lot of gender questioning myself. I’m now married to a transman, and together we are raising my two biological children from a previous marriage and three foster children we hope to adopt.”

In other words, this isn’t Abby Johnson, the former Planned Parenthood manager who fully converted to being a pro-life activist.

Yet Reed recently left her job as case manager at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital “because I could no longer participate in what was happening there.” She added, “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.”

Not only that, but she chose to speak out despite the personal risk.

“Almost everyone in my life advised me to keep my head down,” she said. “But I cannot in good conscience do so. Because what is happening to scores of children is far more important than my comfort. And what is happening to them is morally and medically appalling.”

She proceeds to tell story after story of teens coming to her clinic. Virtually all of them came from broken homes, and their desired “solution” was to change who they are. Meanwhile, there were almost no guardrails for the center to follow.

“Soon after my arrival at the Transgender Center, I was struck by the lack of formal protocols for treatment,” Reed wrote. The result was a steady increase in patients, including a drastic increase in the number of teen girls seeking to “transition.” Others have noted what should be called a “social contagion” among female teenagers.

Rather than actually help these distressed young women, Reed’s clinic processed them like cattle. “To begin transitioning,” she explained, “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.”

Teen patients were told of some side effects, but they clearly did not understand the full weight of what they were doing to their bodies — in some cases irreversibly. Reed tells a few horror stories to make this point clear. The details are not for the faint of heart.

She also lamented the extent to which parents were manipulated or undermined. In Missouri, for example, only one has to agree to treatment of a minor. Another horror story ensued.

Predictably, when Reed began to speak up about her misgivings, she was penalized by bad employee reviews and otherwise pressured to conform. Even when she suggested that the clinic should simply track “desistance and detransition” among patients, “One doctor wondered aloud why he would spend time on someone who was no longer his patient.”

Eventually, she quit.

She was inspired to do more than just quit by, ironically, Joe Biden’s “transgender” poster child, Richard Rachel Levine. An article about him said, “Levine, the U.S. assistant secretary for health, said that clinics are proceeding carefully and that no American children are receiving drugs or hormones for gender dysphoria who shouldn’t.”

“I felt stunned and sickened,” Reed said after reading that. “It wasn’t true. And I know that from deep first-hand experience.”

So, she recorded her experience in detail and took her findings to the Missouri attorney general. On Thursday, newly elected AG Andrew Bailey announced that he has opened an investigation of Reed’s former employer based on her allegations.

In explaining why she’d go to a Republican with this, she said, “The safety of children should not be a matter for our culture wars.”

She went much further in her conclusion, advocating for an end to what she calls “a kind of national experiment.”

“Given the secrecy and lack of rigorous standards that characterize youth gender transition across the country,” she wrote, “I believe that to ensure the safety of American children, we need a moratorium on the hormonal and surgical treatment of young people with gender dysphoria. In the past 15 years, according to Reuters, the U.S. has gone from having no pediatric gender clinics to more than 100. A thorough analysis should be undertaken to find out what has been done to their patients and why — and what the long-term consequences are.”

We can give her one answer that she didn’t delve into: Money. Dogmatically enforced ideology most certainly plays a leading role, but there’s an awful lot of money to be made creating a permanent class of medical patients out of otherwise physically healthy individuals. The younger, the better. It’s sick and it must stop.