The Daily Signal - Missouri Trans Clinic Whistleblower Has a Message for the Left

Episode Date: January 26, 2024

Jamie Reed, the former clinician who blew the whistle last year on a gender clinic in St. Louis, tells "The Daily Signal Podcast" that there are more whistleblowers out there, and she raises the alarm about the "totalitarian" mentality of large LGBTQ organizations that seek to silence those who disagree with them. She also warns leaders on the Left that most Americans oppose rushing kids to medical “treatments” that will likely harm them. Read the story here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Friday, January 26th. I'm Tyler O'Neill. I sat down with Jamie Lynn Reed. She is the whistleblower for the gender clinic in St. Louis, Missouri, who made a humongous splash when she came out. And, I mean, she is herself left-leaning. She identifies as progressive and she said that she's married to a trans man. So when she came out and said that the gender clinic in St. Louis, had been pushing kids onto these harmful interventions to, quote, unquote, affirm their transgender identities at young ages without going through enough steps to really make sure this is what they wanted, without adequately providing informed consent, and then not changing their minds when they saw these kids harmed by these procedures.

I mean, it made tremendous news, and she deserves so much credit for having the courage to come up and stand there and just tell the truth about how horrible some of these interventions are. So I sat down with her. She shared a lot of her own personal experience. One of the things that really shocked me was she talked about a 19-year-old patient who had a double mastectomy. and then in three months she called us back begging for her breast to be put back on. That's how Reed described it. And it just boggles my mind that this is happening across America. And it's so important that Jamie Reed is telling her story.

And so she told me a few things. First, she said that more whistleblowers are coming because there are so many of these clinics engaging in these horrific practices across America. And she knows some of them personally. And she knows that eventually their stories are going to come out. So the truth is coming and Americans will be hearing more about how children have been really abused by the medical system in this way. And then she also told me, you know, Jamie Reed is LGBT herself. But, you know, she's part of that movement to some degree, but she slammed the big LGBT groups by saying that they have become bullies and they have a totalitarian mentality to try to silence dissent, especially when it comes to the transgender issue.

She also told me that a majority of grassroots Democrats actually oppose sterilizing children. But the Democratic Party seems unwilling to realize that this is not a partisan issue. And her message there I thought was really, really important because many people on the left and the right share outrage at the way that kids are being treated by these clinics. And I think it's extremely important that her message gets out there. So listen to my interview with Jamie Reed right after this. conservative women are problematic women. Why? Because we don't adhere to the agenda of the radical left. Every Thursday morning on the Problematic Women podcast, Kristen I, Cammer, Lauren Evans, and me, Virginia Allen, are joined by other conservative women to break down the big issues and news you care about.

Whether you're interested in hot takes and conversations on pop culture or what Congress is up to, problematic women has you covered. We sort through the news to keep you up to date on the issues that are of particular interest to conservative leaning that is problematic women. Find problematic women wherever you like to listen to podcasts and follow the show on Instagram. This is Tyler O'Neill, a managing editor at The Daily Signal, and I'm honored to be joined by Jamie Reed, who's a whistleblower at a pediatric transgender center in Missouri, whose damning testimony, I really blew the lid open. on the shoddy way that transgender medicine is practiced here in the United States. It's such a pleasure to have you. Thank you so much. So, Jamie, if you would tell us a little bit about your story going into how you ended up

working at this clinic and what your expectations were for medicine there. Yeah. So I was in a position that's really akin to that of a social worker. My background is in cultural anthropology and clinical research. But I spent years working in case management roles. where I was working with young adults, adolescents, primarily at the same university I was working with young adults who are HIV positive. And so there was a lot of overlap with HIV positive patients and especially trans women. And so I was working closely with that population for a number of years.

The pediatric center at Wash You Open in 2017, and I joined as their full-time case manager in 2018. And what did you, you know, witness there? How did this build? And I mean, ultimately it led to you having to resign in protest. So I was there for four years and about four months. And it was a really long process. But there were some elements pretty early that were just concerning on an organizational kind of structured level. This care was based on a couple of pretty shoddy guidelines and papers, one out of the Endocrine Society and one out of the World Professional Organization.

of transgender health known as W-Path. And, you know, the clinicians were really relying on these, you know, guidelines that were not really clear and didn't have a lot of built-in layers of protocol or organization. So we were finding pretty early on that there were a lot of cases with just disagreement in treatment protocols, none of which the parents ever saw. The parents thought that this was a multidisciplinary team that was all in complete agreement with medicalizing their kids. So it took a couple of years, but, um, It was on a case-by-case basis at first. A patient here that didn't meet guidelines, yet we were still giving them hormones. A patient here that had a lot of trauma that we weren't, you know, treating therapeutically. And it just got almost to a tipping point where there was really just so much contention within the center that we were essentially told myself and another staff, we had to stop raising concerns about patients. We had to get on board or get out. And what was the most shocking example of over? overlooking standards that you think should naturally be applied.

I wish there was just one, I wish it was one case and that was it. But it was this kind of systematic treatment model that was everyone got the same treatment course. And there was so little individualization. Basically, no one was ever told no if they met these basic guidelines. And we were seeing systematic harms. We were seeing patients who were starting treatments who were getting worse and worse. their mental health was getting worse.

And we were never stopping treatments. So we'd put someone on a puberty blocker and their mental health got horrible. And there was never the in medicine. There should be this built in. We did X. Patient is worse. We need to consider stopping X. And it was never the way of thinking.

And then we did just see some young people just really severely harmed. We had patients who had lacerations because the medicines that we were giving them were making their genital tissues really. really weak and we had patients who required surgeries on an emergency going into the ER basis. And then we started seeing detransitioners. So patients who we started on treatment that they later went on to regret and want to stop. And then we had a 19-year-old patient who had had a double mastectomy. So both of her breasts were surgically removed. And within three months, she called us back begging for her breasts to be put back on. How do you even respond to that? Yeah. Well, and the last I heard, she,

she was pregnant and she was going to have a baby. And it's just thinking about the lack of the lack of long, the care for the doctors just didn't extend into. It's like their time horizon was very short. Right. It was like, I saw you. I gave it to you. Great. You're done. And it was like not thinking about these young, young people and the entire life that they had ahead of them. When I think I read in your free press story how one of the patients was saying identified as a rock or as something else. and then like they were still treated as if this were serious. So this is this is a situation that is referred to as neo pronouns. So and this is where we would we finally had some doctors finally saying, where is the line. This is out of, this is just reached to the point where it's completely out of control. But we would have these teens coming in and instead of saying, I'm trans, I was born a girl,

but I want you to call me he, him. These young people were saying, my pronoun. are rock or mushroom or it. And they wanted us to like refer to them, you know, to me it's demoralizing. To me, it's like being complicit in their own self-harm because they themselves are just basically saying, I'm in so much distress that I'm not even going to give myself the self-respect to acknowledge myself as a person. And I want you to go along with that.

And those were things where it was just like, where is the line? Like where how can it's almost like we could never see rock bottom. But to me, a patient or a young person asking us to refer to them as mushroom or it was just, no. It's no. I'm not going to work. I'm not going to be in a situation where I am going along with your own self-harm. When the issue first came up to me, you know, I covered the story of the transgender dragon lady who went by it and had all these expensive things to, you know, He was a man who identified as a woman who then identified as a dragon.

But this is reality. The fact, like, this is what, this is what this is where, like, everyone's always going to be like, can we pause for a minute and acknowledge that we're actually discussing this as if this belongs in a hospital setting, period. Like, there are people coming into these emergency rooms with gunshot wounds in my area. And we are seriously talking to a young person and giving them this, like, the room to have a discussion if we're going to call the mushroom or not. It's absurd. It's just, we have way more important things to do. So when you came out with your expose and the Attorney

General of Missouri listened to you, acted on it, but I'm very interested, how did the media in general, the mainstream press, react? And were there some outlets that treated you with hostility that, you know, when you were speaking to them in an interview, they printed something entirely different. So a lot of it came down to local press I just, I didn't feel like I could even speak to. So as soon as the story broke in the free press, the first piece that they ran was, I don't know how to characterize it, but a hit piece where they came after not the affidavit, not the story, not the clinic, but the choice of the political party of my attorneys. Wow. And so part of that is, I don't think you need to go into that for any attorney.

An attorney as attorney, you hire them for their skills as an attorney. But it was just so disheartening that it was just reduced again to all it seems like we can talk about as if this is a Republican Democrat issue. And it absolutely was not. So my local press, you know, went after me in that way. I've had a lot of just challenges with press even to this day because one of the things that I was naive. And what I thought was what happened is I, the. affidavit was put out, the attorney general began an investigation, and I made the wrong assumption that the university was going to cooperate and that the state would have access to records to follow up and see what we

were discussing. And to this day, the state of Missouri has still not gotten any sort of investigation moving forward. And it's this huge battle in the courts about whether or not they'll ever even going to show any of the records. And so there's a mixed bag to that. A lot of that is, I have. have comfort knowing that it's sitting there in medical records, and I hope that those records will never be destroyed. But at the same time, we're almost a year out, and there never was an actual investigation done. I worked with, you know, a huge outlet the New York Times, and I felt that Azeen did a, I honestly think she did a really good job. She spent, she spent days and days with me, and she went through all of the emails. She went through text messages, you know, from the team,

and she really did dig in and try to look at the story as best she could. And she did go and find some parents who are happy and were happy with the treatments. I've never said that you weren't going to be able to find that. I just think as a system overall we need to ask, is this the right pathway forward when you have so many kids who are being harmed? And just for context, you know, you're not an opponent of the idea that people who, you know, are people who identify as the gender opposite there. biological sex can be fulfilled in that identity. So I do oppose any pediatric medical transitions.

So I believe that we need to stop using puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and any surgical interventions with children or adolescents. For adults, I believe that there is a small number of adults for whom they have attempted, you know, therapeutic options and a medical gender transition is a way forward for them that makes them the most comfortable. And I think that for most of the trans adults I care about and work with, they recognize the tradeoff that they are still having to make really difficult medical decisions. They know it's going to affect them. They know that there are, you know, real side effects to these treatments. But I do think that there's adults should be able to access that care within a therapeutic setting with good medical quality care, but only for adults.

Yeah. And that piece of therapy, it's interesting. I cover a group called the Southern Poverty Law Center. Yes. And they recently released an article, a super long series attacking pseudoscience and opposing. They also forgot to spell check the entire thing. Yes, they did. Yes, they did.

I don't know how that got published. And they operate on the assumption that. any sort of therapy that might address an underlying issue on the gender issue, on when it comes to gender dysphoria. Like many, many detransitioners say that there have been other psychological issues that under, that undergird their gender dysphoria and therefore resolving those was the fundamental solution. The SPLC demonizes this as a form of conversion therapy.

And I'd like to hear your response to that idea. So the use of those ideas about conversion therapy is a skill. care tactic that goes back to very outdated ways of trying to change someone's sexual orientation. Nothing like that could be further from the truth. But anyone who's experiencing distress about their gender, the best way to treat that is to figure out the underlying reasons for that gender distress. And so many of the patients we saw, unfortunately, had had early sexual abuse, had sexual trauma had had trauma in their family who had underlying really severe mental health issues. And the

thing about medical transition is it's not an easy path. Anyone that medically transitions has to have a period of time where they are changing in public and their body and their external presentation changes. And there are things about interacting with society that changes. And it is a disservice to anybody to have a good process. If we do it. don't provide them first with the utmost absolute best mental health care that we can. So even if someone's going into that and they do have autism disorder, bipolar disorder, major depression, anxiety, why would we not want to give them the best treatment of those things first so that they are able to make that decision in the best mental health place that they can

before they undergo lifelong interventions? Yeah. I think I think that's an excellent question. and I really would like to see W. Path and some of the other advocacy groups really wrestle with it. Are there next steps that you're, you know, you're still working with the Attorney General on an investigation? Are you considering any legal action of your own? You know, what does the future look like for you on this issue? I think those are great questions.

So most of the Attorney General's work is in their court at this point. I live in a state where we did pass a law that put a four-year-old. moratorium on any new patients accessing puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgery is minor. And there was a grandfather clause in that. But because they also extended the statute of limitations, so patients who were harmed could sue, most basically every provider in my state has shut down, which is a great outcome. So next steps for me personally, I have actually been working really closely with an amazing group of adult, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans people who are all opposed to pediatric medical transitions. We've put together an LGBT courage coalition. We're working on

in corporation. And one of the biggest things that we're trying to kind of put the message out there is I know there are other whistleblowers. I know because I talk to some of them, but I know that there are other whistleblowers in this field that see similar harms. And one of the things I recognize is so many people who work in this field are LGBT. And so we want to give them a place to reach out, a soft landing, a group of us who are willing to walk them through their own process. For some people, that's simply having a place to discuss what they've seen, maybe not go public, maybe find new employment, but for some people working towards that process of going public, putting together their own affidavits, there are people working on this from behind the scenes in different states

that, you know, their name might never be known. But I think the public should know that I am not the only one. And we really are working to create a organization and a home for new whistleblowers to come forward. Yeah, that's very encouraging. Where can our audience find that group support your work? You know, do everything that we can to keep shining a light on these issues. So the year anniversary of the Free Press article is in February. So we're hoping to really launch in February.

Right now we're operating a substack, which has been amazing. We've already gotten a ton of subscribers. Really to open up the dialogue, too, because people think that the LGBT is this like monolith, and we're all in support of this. And that is the farthest thing from the truth. And then you can find the LGBT Courage Coalition on X, and you can also find me there at Jamie Whistle. And do you see this as part of, you know, I really have been impressed by the free press. I think there's a lot of moderate and even liberal. who are fed up with certain abuses, I would say this is probably the worst, but there are some

other abuses we've been seeing among our elites. Would you say that this is part of a movement of holding people accountable in power that's far beyond just the right? Yes, but part of that where outlets like the free press come in and where journalists like Jesse Single or podcasts or substacks come in is that we really have seen basically an erosion of the press in the United States. And the press on this issue has really been beholden to and have had bullied. They've been bullied by historic LGBT organizations. They've had, you know, the New York Times writes a piece and, you know, the Glad truck shows up calling them transphobes. So one of the things we need is not just the elite in the politicians, but we need journalists to go back to what journalism is supposed to be,

which is seeking out the truth, no matter how hard, or who that offends. And then also as, you know, just a citizen, I've realized that part of what I need to go back to doing is actually, you know, people used to buy the newspaper every day. And so, you know, subscribing to journalists who might not be able to be employed at a mainstream place anymore, but who have started doing work on their own, who are using these new outlets like Substack, the free press, paying for a subscription, I'm still, I still pay for our New York Times subscription because at the end of the day, I want those outlets to also have the support and the money to actually be able to do the investigative work that this is going to need. This needs real investigations. This needs journalists who are

willing to go to these hospital executives and say, show us the numbers. Don't just say you haven't done a surgery. Show us your books. And what would you say to the LGBT organizations? I mean, HRC, you know, the human rights campaign, Glad. I think also of the Southern Poverty Law Center on the, you know, weaponized, almost, you know, aggressive end. But like, what would you tell them about this issue? How can they, you know, what should they do instead of pushing this for minors? They're wrong. Simply put, they have gotten this wrong. And they've gotten this wrong for two reasons. The first one is the science is incorrect. And these treatments are at their core harming young, gay and lesbian. people. And secondary, one of the other things that they have helped is to institutionalize bullying. They have become the bullies. And so so much of this started out that we just wanted to be kind and, you know, to fight bullies. And instead, they themselves have become organizations that bullies those who don't agree with every single thing they say into silence. And that is not any sort of community I want to live in. I don't want to claim to be in a community of the LGBT and you all have to think the same. And free

speech has been eroded and taken away. I did not sign up to me in a totalitarian anything. And that's how they've been behaving. Well, thank you so much, Jamie. Is there anything else you'd like to add? I think we touched on a lot. But I'll give you the last word. Thank you so much. And I think 2024 is going to be a huge year. This is a presidential. And I really am ready for the Democrats. to actually go back to their base and have real conversations because the Democrats are also with us on this. Wow. You heard it here first. The Democrats, the majority of Democrats, the grassroots, the grassroots.

The people, when you explain what's going on, they are not in support of sterilizing children. Yeah. When their party should realize that. Absolutely. I've always thought this should not be a partisan issue. It's not a partisan issue. This is basics, science, the rights of women, and the rights of. gay, lesbian people to grow up with whole and intact bodies.

Yeah, who would have thought? Yeah. Thank you. And that was Jamie Reed, the former clinician who blew the whistle on the gender clinic in St. Louis, Missouri. If you like what you heard here, if you found it inspiring or chilling or really important, we'd appreciate it if you would share the Daily Signal podcast, leave a five-star rating and review. We read all of your feedback. And don't forget to come back to this very podcast at 5 p.m. this evening when we do our top news edition,

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