American Thought Leaders - The Truth About Gender Clinics: Whistleblower Jamie Reed

Episode Date: January 22, 2024

Sponsor special: Up to $2,500 of FREE silver AND a FREE safe on qualifying orders - Call 855-862-3377 or text “AMERICAN” to 6-5-5-3-2 “We were bullying people into these concepts. It was an ideological bullying across the medical spectrum. And as you pull out of medicine, you see this in the schools, in journalism, in peer-reviewed publications—it’s everywhere.”In 2018, Jamie Reed began working as a case manager at a pediatric gender center. But after witnessing firsthand the irreversible effect that “gender-affirming care” was having on children, she decided to speak out.“At the end of the day in these centers, nobody was the responsible one. So, the therapists would write a letter thinking that the endocrinologist was making the decision, the endocrinologist would say, ‘But the therapist wrote the letter.’ And then they would all go and say, ‘But the parents are making the decision,’” says Ms. Reed.She was recently instrumental in Missouri state legislation to extend the statute of limitations for those harmed by gender treatment. That fear of liability, claims Ms. Reed, was enough to close her former gender clinic.“I was complicit, I worked in an industry that was harming children. And the thing that I have to grapple with every day is making amends for that and trying to address the wrongs that I participated in,” says Ms. Reed.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

We were bullying people into these concepts. It was an ideological bullying across the medical spectrum. In 2018, Jamie Reed started work as a case manager at a pediatric gender center. But after witnessing firsthand the irreversible harms of so-called gender-affirming care on children, she decided to blow the whistle. At the end of the day in these centers, nobody was the responsible one. The therapist would write a letter thinking that the endocrinologist was making the decision. The endocrinologist would say, but the therapist wrote the letter.

And then they would all go and say, but the parents are making the decision. I worked in an industry that was harming children. And the thing that I have to grapple with every day is trying to address the wrongs that I've participated in. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Janja Kelley. Before we start, I'd like to take a moment to thank the sponsor of our podcast, American Hartford Gold. As you all know, inflation is getting worse. The Fed raised rates for the fifth time this year, and Fed Chairman Jerome Powell is telling Americans to brace themselves for potentially

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Again, that's 855-862-3377. Or text AMERICAN to 65532. Jamie Reed, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thank you so much. Well, it's been about a year almost now since you announced that you're going to blow the whistle on the Pediatric Gender Clinic at Washington University. And my goodness, a lot has happened since then. Why don't you tell me, for starters, a little bit about what it's like to become a whistleblower in this field? Surprisingly, it's been very positive. There is a great cultural moment in time where this is a topic of huge interest to the American public. And there are so many thoughtful, intelligent people who are discussing this, debating this, and having courageous conversations every day. And I've been really welcomed into this network and circle

of people. So as I understand it, the clinic is now closed. So that's been a significant change, right? Yes. It was a bit of a process. So in the state of Missouri, they did introduce some legislation. The similar legislation had been introduced for a few years previous to my whistleblow but after that occurred the legislation was was working through and the state of Missouri passed a law to impose a moratorium a four-year moratorium, on any new pediatric patients starting a puberty blocker, cross-sex hormones, or having surgery. And there was a grandfather clause in. So basically anyone who had already been on these treatments could continue. But one of the things that the legislature did is they increased the limit of time that somebody could sue if they were harmed by

treatment. So in most states, this is really limited. It's maybe one or two years. So they increased the limit of time. And just that fear of liability closed the center. So most of the centers in the state of Missouri that were offering pediatric care have ceased to do so because of the extended period of time for liability. Fascinating. I mean, it's incredible how what seems to be like a small change, you know, in legislation. What is a small change, but also it's interesting for the narrative because the narrative is these are safe, effective treatments, long-term good care. And if that were the case, then nobody would be afraid of an extended period of time for malpractice.

I read the affidavit you provided to the Missouri AG. It's utterly shocking. And I think we kind of have to start at the beginning. For starters, you were working at this clinic, fully bought into the whole approach at one point. Tell me how you got into this in the first place. So I've spent years working in roles that are social work roles, so case management roles, working with individuals who are coming into their own for age and learning how to navigate adulthood and being a teen. So I was working with young adults who were HIV positive.

And there is a big overlap for some trans people and HIV, particularly trans women, experience high levels of HIV infection. And so I was finding that a lot of the individuals that I were working with were trans-identified. So I became sort of an expert in trans issues within that setting. I was really good at helping people with things like legal name change, gender marker change. I understood these systems. I was looking at resources and ways to help people. And so this position came up working in the pediatric center.

And a number of people came to me and said, you should apply for this. This really seems just something that you would be really good at. And so I applied, I started, that would have been around 2018. The center had only been open for a year and I was the second person to take the role of the case manager in the center and really probably only one of two people in the entire state of Missouri to have such a role. And I really did go into this believing that we were going to alleviate suffering and help young people become their truth selves and

embody their their truth. That's interesting right because this is the kind of the core idea here behind this is that if you help young people early to realize they're the opposite sex or something different than their, as what they call assigned at birth, which I find that phraseology, frankly, highly problematic. But yeah, that if you deal with that early, then you'll have a healthy, happy person on the other side. That's the core. So would you agree? Yeah, that's the core idea behind the whole concept.

Yes. Everything I've been learning about this over the last several years tells me the opposite is true. Yes. If you really start to look at where these treatments came from and evolved and how we came to even be interfering in the pediatric body, you start to really question the whole model of care itself. I didn't realize when I started at this center the history of how this developed out of something called the Dutch Protocol that came out of the Netherlands and how truly revolutionary and without a lot of good quality research it was to start blocking puberty in a healthy

developing body and go from a puberty blocker to a cross-sex hormone in a pediatric child's body. And as I worked in the center and as I began to understand more and more not only where this came from, but what we were seeing in the population, so many truths about the Dutch model they excluded young people with these psychiatric comorbidities whereas in the scenario that you were working almost every prospective patient had serious psychiatric comorbidities yeah yeah. Yeah. So the Dutch were excluding individuals with severe or concurrent mental health issues, but they were also excluding patients who did not have lifetime gender dysphoria. So part of their protocol was people had to have been experiencing this condition that we call gender dysphoria from a very, very young age. And what we're seeing in this cohort in the United States is a huge number of, frankly, teenagers who do not

have any lifetime or early onset gender issues presenting in these clinics. And there are teens who have learned enough to say, oh but I have been experiencing this from an early age. But we see this disconnect where they claim this but there's no real family history. In medicine, you want to not only trust but verify. So if somebody tells me, I've had this since I was, you know, my earliest memories, but yet you can find nothing in their medical records. There was nothing where they came to a pediatrician and mom had a conversation with the pediatrician about, I'm concerned about my child's gender presentation or kindergarten teacher. You know, there's nothing documenting this. These are really a significant number of teens who are coming forward at 15, 16 with these presentations that we just don't see any history of. And these are patients that were

always excluded. These were not patients that were included in these early treatment models. What were you thinking? You mentioned you believed you were stepping into something that could be helpful, right, to young people, I think. But just explain to me the mental state or the reality or the core assumptions of a person that is involved in this ostensibly in believing they're doing good? I think there's a number of themes that you see in pediatric gender medicine. So in a number of these centers, these are doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, who really do have strong beliefs about

helping young people. They see suffering. A lot of these doctors are young doctors. They're newer in these fields. One of our doctors was directly out of residency, and he was named a co-director. And there is an intentional practice of hiring into these centers of people directly from my community. So they are hiring individuals who are within the LGBT. And that's intentional. And it also creates these feelings where you cannot go against these narratives because you're not just, you're going against your own tribe. You're going against your own people. If you step forward and say, I don't see this working the way that it was sold. I see people being harmed. And one of the reasons why there are so many lesbian, gay, bi adults who are working in this field is because so many people experienced gender questioning and confusion as a young person. For so many lesbian, gay, and bi people, it's just part of our growing up. We experience gender in different ways. We are tomboys. We are what used to be referred

to as sissy girls. We experience gender differently. And part of the problem is we see ourselves in these kids, yet we have no good way of diagnostically differentiating who of these patients would just grow up to be a gay person versus who might experience more of a lifelong gender questioning pathway. Which, for all accounts, is extremely rare. Extremely rare. Honestly, if you looked at earlier data, most of these kids are gay kids. And most of the gay community that I struggle with is we are taking away sexual function and fertility from our own selves as younger people. And that's something that is hard to face as a as an adult who has had biological children, who has been able to find comfort

with in my own gender and sex. We're taking these decisions and we're taking this away from children. If there's anything we've learned about from the last few years is this power of social conformity or the power of the need to belong, overcoming, frankly, in a lot of cases, rationality. So I'm kind of beginning to get a sense of how this works. But the effects, as you pointed out moments ago, on these kids are a life of suffering. I mean, that's not oversimplifying is it like it for in many cases. No we were not just an ideological bubble but we were upheld by the university. Our culture right now is

upholding places like these as if we are somehow the sacred, the unable to be questioned. We didn't just run the Pediatric Gender Center. We infiltrated, like we went into the other medical divisions and we had the audacity to go in and train in these other divisions so that they would start to take on the language. In my training, I would directly say, we are not here to be the language police, but you can't say this to your patients. You can't say this to your patients. You have to use whatever pronouns your patients come forward with. You have to change the charts to update how they're identifying. We were going into these medical systems like tentacles and going into them to shift this all across the board. And when we first went and were doing these trainings in 2018, there was no pushback. The audience would be kind of just like, oh, these are, you know, they know everything. They're so great.

And by the end of 2022, 2023, other medical professionals were slowly starting to recapture what they already knew. They were starting to push back and ask questions. And they would say, is there a line anywhere? Do we just affirm anything these children are saying? And part of the complicity that I still feel is I feel like we were bullying people into these concepts. It was an ideological bullying across the medical spectrum. And as you pull out of medicine, you see this in the schools and journalism, in peer-reviewed publications. It's everywhere. It's that if you question this, you get to be, you're the worst of the worst. You're transphobic, you're homophobic, you're a Nazi. I mean, it's just the capture in all of these systems is just remarkable how quickly it occurred. I'm going to read something that I pulled.

The center tells the public and parents that it makes individualized decisions. One would hope, right? This is not true. Doctors at the center believe that every child who meets four basic criteria, age or puberty stage, therapist's letter, parental consent, and a one-hour visit with a doctor is a good candidate for irreversible medical intervention. When a child meets these four simple criteria, the doctors always decide to move forward with puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones. There were no objective medical test or criteria or individualized assessments. How is that remotely possible? Those were some of the basic scientific questions that began to really trouble me. So in medicine, there should be a differential diagnosis done. And everyone presenting cannot, just statistically, cannot come through to the other

side meeting the differential. It's almost like if everybody went and said, I have rheumatoid arthritis, and everyone that presented that claimed that they had already diagnosed themselves came out the other side with treatments for rheumatoid arthritis. We had set up a system where children were basically fulfilling the role that we used to give to doctors with training to provide a differential diagnosis. And what was so challenging was that seeing it continue to fall on the kids. Because in these rooms, I would watch parents, you know, basically turn to their adolescents who were struggling or in so much distress and basically say to them, you know, you have to be sure about this. Are you really sure? Because this is, and everybody at the end of the day just looked at the kid. And part of what as a parent I know

makes children even more anxious and struggle even more is when we don't tell them that the adults in the room, we've got this covered. We're the adults. We make the decisions. It is not on your shoulders. And we have created a medical system where we have put all of this on the kids. So then imagine if you're a kid and you say in a room, yes, this is it. I know this is the treatment that I need. And then you find out two, three, four years later, it's not. There's so much pressure on them to continue because we have allowed them to make that decision, a decision that should never have been theirs in the first place.

Well, there's an incredibly heartbreaking anecdote which you cite, which is the young girl who asks to have her breasts put back on after double mastectomy. I don't even know what to say about that. But horribly misled and, you know, abused, it comes to mind. It was a failure on so many individuals going in to allow her to have that surgery. But the thing then that just was such a gut check was on the back end. You have a patient calling within three months of surgery reporting this, and the surgeon couldn't even bother to take the call or call them back. The person who actually removed this healthy tissue from this person in front of them

couldn't even be bothered to pick up the phone and call them back and hear their pain and acknowledge it. It was pushed off on myself and our nurse to do this follow-up. The hubris, the lack of being willing to see the harm that one did, it's horrible. What kind of accountability followed this scenario? There was no accountability. The university, the hospital administrators, there was no accountability. And what made me realize that this was not an individual patient failure, this was a systematic failure,

was because this patient met the criteria. I mean they had a letter from a therapist, they had worked with the therapist ahead of time, they had met what was laid out by what's referred to as WPATH. It just continued to show me that this was a, the whole machine was broken, not just an individual cog or an individual cog there. It was every element was the only way that the machine could spin was to take someone

and put them into the treatment path. And there was no, there were no off-ramps at any point. I think you offer a few examples where treatment was declined for some very arcane reason. There's a systematic, systemic problem. Everyone gets pushed in the same direction if they possibly can be and is it just that people believe so deeply that this is what everybody must do that starts or is there some other there's this financial and scepter structures I've talked spoken with people show on the show about that how do you

understand this works so I think there's a few elements that are hard for individual doctors within these systems to pause. So within the center that I worked in there were basically about eight people on the team. There were only two individuals that touched every single chart and so the two of us that touched every single chart. And so the two of us that touched every patient chart, who saw every patient as this whole cohort, we were the two that pretty quickly started picking up on the trend lines, seeing the harms, seeing that a significant number of patients were not doing well, seeing the 30% loss to follow-up rate. I mean, we were having patients start and then disappear. The doctors were seeing the patients who they started on a treatment, who then came back three

months later and said, oh, it's wonderful. And six months later, oh, it's wonderful. And there were so many patients that they even didn't see some of those patients, a small number, would go through and, you know, be happy. But the issue is in medicine, we were pretty much seeing this 30%, 30%, 30%. So 30% were saying, this is great. This is happy for me now. 30% were having no change, really either better or worse in the short term. And then 30% were really, really struggling, falling apart. The treatments were obviously immediately harming. Initially, that was almost like, okay, because you could focus on that 30% that it seemed to be going well. The longer that I was there, the patients that at year one were doing well, year two were doing well, year three were doing well,

you started to see by year four, they were not meeting what we would consider the goals of growing up, of adolescence. So if we started you on a puberty blocker at 13, and the thing we were saying about this treatment is we're making you a happy, healthy kid, what do we expect from a 16, 17, 18, 19 year old? Well, we want them to be getting a driver's license, maybe having their first job, maybe starting to think about college, maybe starting to progress outside of having a room full of stuffed animals. You know, we want them to be achieving the goals of adolescence into young adulthood. And even that 30 percent, that cohort, which we were claiming this was good, they were still struggling behind their peers.

And part of what I also was seeing was that their identities were not staying consistent. These were kids who were claiming at this age that they were a woman or a girl. We were then seeing four years later that their identity had shifted to some vague non-binary. The people that tout these treatments claim, oh, they're just on their gender journey. But as someone who's been working as a social worker for years, I want to see people progressing through the stages of life. And these kids were just not doing that. Something that trans rights activists, I will give them. I will concede.

We have been transitioning humans for probably 40, 50 years. 1960s, 70s, we started some of these treatments with adults. The things about all of the trans adults that I work with, that I'm friends with today, in this older cohort, is they intuitively understood their biological sex. And they recognized that these treatments were changing their outward presentation to make them feel more comfortable interacting in the world. But they did not have these almost disassociative concepts about their identity. Part of what is really hard for younger kids and younger cohorts is, you know, we have to, as the adults, talk to them about the truth of what biological sex is, what the physical body is, what can and cannot be changed. I'm a parent with kids who range from 2 to 15. I've interacted with toddlers who will straight up ask you sometimes, am I a boy or a girl? And they rely on us to

explain the reality of biology and sex to them so that they can ground themselves in the reality of the world. And so one of the things I think that this young cohort really struggles with is that they have this group of adults who are lying to them and saying, no, you are, you know, trans women are women, you are a woman, and trying to come into adolescence, into young adulthood with that narrative, then coming up against the actual reality of the world, which is, no, your biological sex does matter. And I do support trans adults who find that the only or the best way for them to move forward for this small group of people is to medically transition and to present to the world as a different gender. I recognize that that helps some people, but what has never helped anyone is to try to create this upside down world where biological sex is ignored.

And so for some of these patients, I think part of growing into adolescence is this recognition and then into young adulthood. Have my parents, have these doctors been lying to me this whole time? And how does that lie then fit for the self to become the self? This is one of the things that I've become increasingly concerned about as I've been learning about this whole area is that you know we're bringing up a whole you use the term cohort you know a whole generation of kids who are insecure in their identity because they're told that can be whatever you want it to be it's a spectrum right and and why not change it from time to time as you feel like it? Well, children need a solid foundation,

a grounding, something to fall back on. You go and explore, but you have that foundation. And if you do not have the foundation and the foundation of your own physical body in space and time, of course the mind is going to be fractured and struggle. How many patients did you see over the, maybe is it three years that you worked there? Almost four and a half. One of the things about gender centers in the United States is nobody is keeping good records. Nobody is keeping data.

I have been trying to advocate since I left that one of the things that we need in this nation to actually have a dialogue is we need solid numbers and solid data. I saw close to 1,200 individual unique patients in my tenure. And we medicalized a significant majority of those. If you look back at the original first pediatric center that opened here in the United States, it's referred to as GEMS. Some of the data that I heard was that they were open for five years. Their first five years, they medicalized 70 patients total. What is happening now in these centers is this rapid, quick, you know, just treatment, treatment, treatment. I don't know how to ask this, but do you reflect on your own sort of participation in this process for these 1,200? Like, how do you, it just must be a difficult thing to deal with. It is. Part of what makes it easier is I'm a mom, and my kids know very little about any of this,

but if anything, I hope that my kids can take away that grown-ups have to be able to acknowledge when we made a mistake. I recognized that mistake probably by the second year of my tenure. And then I spent probably two years trying within to see if we could shift the care or at least we would case conference patients and we would bring forward patients. And, you know and I would advocate and say, this patient does not meet criteria. I have a lot of concerns about this patient. Can this patient maybe, can we just put a pause? I found myself almost begging or arguing in case conferencing.

We would have young patients who had experienced sexual abuse or assault and I would ask before we give this patient testosterone can we ask them to do six months of trauma therapy can we see if we could help them to address the trauma first before we before we do this irreversible change. And so I spent a number of years trying that, trying to advocate in that way, and that went nowhere. And then there was this weird fear that I knew that if I left, I would simply be replaced by somebody even more ideologically driven. So then there was this liminal space where I thought,

if I stay, then potentially I could help some of these kids in some way. But I was complicit. I worked in an industry that was harming children. And the thing that I have to grapple with every day is making amends for that and trying to address the wrongs that I participated in. As it turns out, on this show, I've had in this chair a number of people in a similar situation

where they were part of something. They realized they're part of is has huge problems then they come out and whistleblower something of the like or leave and then have to grapple my own position on this is that that's that's a rare thing and incredible and should be lauded okay that that's view. The reason I'm talking about this right now is we live in a society where a lot of people have been complicit in a lot of things that they are not going to be very proud of. They're going to have to deal with the same type of situation. I think it's much more common a reality than most people are ready to admit, but hopefully as a process of healing, they will be admitting such things to themselves.

How do we do that? The word process is good. Being intentional. The part that I struggle with the most is when people come up to me and say, oh, thank you so much for what you've done. You know, you're a hero. And it's like, no, no.

I should have done more and quicker and sooner and differently. I think a lot of this is who have detransitioned, who went through these treatments and are grappling with the medical harms. And one of the things that I think we all can do as a society, and especially doctors in general, is to acknowledge the person in front of us for who they are and what we have put them through and not turn a blind eye. And so one of the things that I can do now is I can't go back and change the past, but I can change every day in my future. And so that means when somebody reaches out to me and wants to sit down with me and tell me their story, I have detransitioners reach out to me and

ask me, Jamie, will you read through my medical records? Because they know I understand how to do that. And so we read through records together and we talk through what I see from the insider's point of view. And I give them a space and I hope to walk with them in that journey because I can't go back and change it, but I can at least do that and be side by side with them and hopefully help others not ignore their existence and see them as people. And then also I want to ask the medical community to also be brave to acknowledge their existence and just recognize them for who they are and what we need to do now. What you've done, you have to live with. But every day is a new day.

And things can change in an instant if you make that choice. I want to talk about this. I expect that there's a lot of people out there now that are kind of thinking the kinds of things you were thinking when you were in this. And I expect you probably even talking to some of them on the down low. So there's a process you went through, which I think was very thoughtful and appropriate, which is to become a whistleblower. So I want to talk a little bit about that for people that might be thinking about this and just understand that there is some sort of recourse. Yeah, whistleblowers are a very interesting group of people. So you find whistleblowers across all industries.

I think this industry, this moment in time, is going to continue to see a number. One of the things that I found really powerful was looking to the English, looking to Britain. There was a clinic called the Tavistock in Britain, and there was a number of whistleblowers that came out of that clinic. There was a number of them working within this bigger group together. And in the United States right now, you have all of these tiny clinics where if you are feeling concerned or a whistleblower or are thinking about being a whistleblower in one of those clinics here in the US,

you're gonna feel really, really alone because you might be the only one on your team. So part of the kind of process I went through was it took so long to get to that affidavit at the AG's office and you know working with the Free Press it took months and months of background work. So it was finding a team, building a team behind me, having really long in-depth conversations about what are you willing to risk, what do you want to risk? What do you want to risk? What

do you want to see happen out of this? And one of the things that I am working on building right now is a coalition of other lesbian, gay, bisexual, and adult trans people. We're calling ourselves the Courage Coalition. And we're trying to build places for other whistleblowers to go. Knowing that so many of the people that work in this industry are going to be people like myself, so LGBT, knowing that you can land in a place where we can help you find legal representation, just a hand to hold, knowing that other people have come before. The biggest fears that I have of becoming whistleblowers that I would be completely alone, isolated, and have to step off a cliff, basically. Well, and lose your livelihood. You've got five kids, you mentioned, right?

Right, right. Whistleblowers, there are legal protections. There has to be, because there's so many industries like this where you have to open up a channel for people to come forward and say, there are harms. And one of the biggest areas for whistleblowers is medicine. You know, some industries that are really dangerous, finance, you know, there are mechanisms in place. And so part of it is just being able to link people

to the right attorneys, to the right support, so that they know that they can be protected in their jobs, their livelihoods, so that they have that safety moving forward. And we are really working to build that specifically in this industry. So what is the first step that a person who is watching and is thinking to themselves, it's time, what should they do? So we're hoping to launch fully about the year anniversary, so probably about a month and a half time, launch a website, launch a safe place to contact. Part of this is documentation, which is tough, but you can have a story to tell, but we do live in a situation where you have to have documentation. You've got to have

the receipts, as they say. You do. You have to have the receipts. And so things like collecting emails, collecting documentation, learning how to redact things and scrub out what's called PHI, but, you know, private health information, scrubbing things out while still keeping the narratives, the stories, the evidence and the proof. But some of the things I've learned is your employer is not the safe place to go. Even if you just Google and look up just general whistleblower statutes, you probably don't want to go to your internal HR systems. You're going to need outside support for this. We're in this really interesting cultural zeitgeist right now. I mean, so many things about this moment in time is because we have things like social media. You know, we have rampant teens, young people, kids have cell phones at 789 where they can go watch, you know, an algorithm that pushes them to TikTok video after TikTok video after TikTok video of trans influencers. One of the biggest myths that is being propagated, I hate to say this,

but even the Ohio governor, you know, it kind of fell for it, is this myth of the suicide narrative, the suicide outcome. That if we do not affirm or give these treatments, you will have individuals who are committing suicide. The data doesn't show that. It's again one of those moments where we have put children in control. So we have created a scenario where you're saying something to the adult that you literally just gave the script to the kid. If they didn't already know it, oh, you know they're going to get in the car and they're going to know exactly what to say to their parent. Children need adults to be adults, to be the ones making decisions, and to be guiding and leading them. At the end of the day in these centers, nobody was the responsible one.

So the therapist would write a letter thinking that the endocrinologist was making the decision, the endocrinologist would say but the therapist wrote the letter, and then they would all go and say but the parents are making the decision. Nobody is stepping forward and being responsible because if somebody were starting to do that, we would have to recognize that there are patients that we would have to say no to. And the thing that was so challenging to see was nobody was ever told no. And you cannot have a functional, medical, diagnostic determination if everybody always gets a yes. It's just not statistically possible. I've covered how this is a sort of social contagion on this show a number of times.

Notably, you mentioned a lot of your patients, these were young girls, probably caught up in this social contagion fueled by TikTok, fueled by social media, and the need to belong and everything else. I know you're not going to be giving medical advice here, but as a parent, you might have a kid who's in this situation. So what should a parent do in general in this sort of situation? This is so challenging. So I remember one, I screened all of the new incoming families and kids. There was a parent telling me the story where their child went to a summer camp. We think we're being great parents. We pay the money.

We give them this extra cultural thing to do as your artsy theater summer camp. Day one, Monday morning, I think they were 12 or 13, the camp counselor put everybody around the circle to do the pronouns, asking these kids, go around the circle, everybody say what your pronouns are. By the end of Tuesday, this was a five-day camp, by the end of Tuesday, the 12-year-old had already said that their pronouns were now they, them. Every day, it was the pronoun game. Every day, it was the identity, identity.

This is how malleable our children are. By the end of Friday, that child was trans-identified. Within five days. And what the parents said to me was they recognized it. They said, well, on Monday they weren't thinking about this at all. By Tuesday they were non-binary By Friday, they were trans. And the mom said to me, but I guess I have to support this or else my child will kill themself. So they had already bought into this. The parent already knew that that was the only response that they should say.

It is so insidious right now that for parents, you know, I've heard of parents who have literally moved their children out of this country. I know of parents who have been homeschooling, who've been pulling people out. And I recognize for individual parents, that might be the thing that they have to do for their child. But we all have to be willing to go to the school board meeting and say, please explain what is happening in our schools. We have to go to the camp counselor on Monday morning for the theater camp and say, can we have a conversation? Are you going to ask all of these 12-year-olds what their pronouns are at the beginning of this camp? I think part of it right now is everybody's afraid that if they do that, they're immediately going to be hit, oh, you're

transphobic, or you don't understand, or you're trying to be anti-LGBT. I will tell you, as somebody from the LGBT, it is not anti-LGBT to not be indoctrinating children into this ideology. And the other thing I know because patients told me, kids told us, they said this was a trend. I had a patient tell me this is the new goth in my school. Figure out what's going on in your school district. Go to the school board meeting. If you see, you know, you walk into a room and everybody picks up a name tag and starts writing their pronouns on it, be willing to say, yeah, no, I'm not doing that. Or if you work in a business and everybody's putting their pronouns at the end of their name, say, no, thank you. I'm not going to be participating in this. And you can do that in a loving, caring, kind way. And I just want people to know you are not a bigot. And you can still be supportive of adults who are lesbian, gay, bi, trans, and not feeling like we need to

indoctrinate the whole world into this. We need to go back to being able to acknowledge that people have different opinions. And it is okay to say, hey, we don't agree on this, but that's cool. Thanks for sitting down and having coffee with me. Well, Jamie Reed, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you all for joining Jamie Reed and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.