At least The New York Times didn’t wait a year and a half like the “newspaper of record” did to confirm that Hunter Biden’s laptop was real.

On February 9, 2023, a whistleblower named Jamie Reed wrote an op-ed for The Free Press — founded by New York Times refugee Bari Weiss to allow for real journalism — to tell the world about some of the horrific abuse being perpetrated on kids she thought she was “saving” in her work at a gender clinic at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. We covered it the next day.

The Times? Meh, we’ll get around to it in six months.

Journalism takes time, we suppose. But so does thorough partisan hackery.

Reed introduced herself in February as “a queer woman, and politically to the left of Bernie Sanders,” and she’s married to a “transgender man.” She left the clinic because instead of helping people, she and her fellow workers were “permanently harming the vulnerable patients in our care.” The big news is that the Times confirmed most of the things Reed alleged, though maintaining, “It’s clear the St. Louis clinic benefited many adolescents.”

The Times quoted an email sent by one nurse at the clinic, who was concerned that “no one is ever told no.” That right there is one of the foundational problems in the entire trans movement.

The Times notes that it’s not clear whether the treatment being offered to virtually every patient was right, even by leftist standards. “As demand rose, more patients arrived with complex mental health issues,” the report said. “The clinic’s staff often grappled with how best to help, documents show, bringing into sharp relief a tension in the field over whether some children’s gender distress is the root cause of their mental health problems, or possibly a transient consequence of them.”

In fact: “Doctors prescribed hormones to patients who had obtained [quick] approvals, even adolescents whose medical histories raised red flags. Some of these patients later stopped identifying as transgender, and received little to no support from the clinic after doing so.”

That’s because this social contagion is only allowed to go one direction.

Unfortunately, Reed never mentioned money as a motivator for the burgeoning “transgender” industry, and the word “money” doesn’t show up in the Times exposé either. But make no mistake: Money is a primary driver of this butchery. Ideological bankruptcy notwithstanding, doctors, clinics, and other snake-oil peddlers rake in enormous piles of money by creating lifelong patients who continue needing round after round of “affirming care.”

Reed also took her allegations to Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, who opened an investigation of the clinic. The Times says, “Missouri’s ban of gender care for minors will begin on Aug. 28.” Apparently, that was all the Times needed to utterly twist the story. Its headline says it: “How a Small Gender Clinic Landed in a Political Storm.”

Uh, maybe by butchering kids to cash in on an ideological cult?

Essentially, while the Times admits that nearly all of what Reed charged was correct, most of its article is dedicated to talking about the “unrelenting surge in demand” of young people struggling immensely with their need for “affirming care.”

“Opened in 2017 inside a children’s hospital affiliated with Washington University in St. Louis, the prestigious clinic was welcomed by many families as a godsend,” the Times gushes. “It was the only place for hundreds of miles where distressed adolescents could see a team of experts to help them transition to a different gender.”

In other words, mistakes were made, but it’s just because the clinic was understaffed and the intrepid clinic workers were just so “overwhelmed” by the need for their services, “all while facing intense political pressure and an adolescent mental health crisis.”

Speaking of that crisis, the Times expresses practically no curiosity while reporting this nugget:

Their patients were part of a striking generational change: Between 2017 and 2020, about 1.4 percent of 13- to 17-year-olds in the United States identified as transgender, nearly double the rate from a few years earlier.

On the same day of the Times report, the American Medical Association’s JAMA Network Open published findings about the frequency of such “treatments.” Among those findings is the fact that gender surgeries in the U.S. tripled between 2016 and 2019, going from 4,500 procedures to 13,000. Fewer than 1,200 were minors, but that’s 1,200 too many.

Isn’t it odd that there’s been a sudden explosion of young people, especially girls, claiming to be “transgender”? Why, it’s almost like it’s a social contagion caused by social media and that aforementioned ideological cult. In any case, the Times shrugs and moves on.

Thanks to Reed and others who know that this is a plague of abuse, more states and even members of Congress are working to end it.