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Jamie Reed is a self-described lesbian liberal Democrat, but she was the keynote speaker at a conservative conference on Friday and spoke out against gender affirming care.
From July 2018 to November 2022, Reed was the case manager and clinical research manager at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. She came in with good intentions, but after seeing the underbelly of gender transition programs, she became a whistleblower and filed a complaint with the Missouri Attorney General’s Office.
Reed also wrote an article for The Free Press about what she witnessed at the center. As co-executive director of the LGB Courage Coalition, she now testifies before state legislators, school boards and conferences about gender affirming practices, calling the current period the “greatest reshuffling of American politics.”
If left alone, most gender-questioning youth would grow up to be gay, she said. In her view, surgery and hormones are an attack on homosexuality and constitute medical malpractice, even if an adult asks for it.
The fight to protect fair play in sports, she said, is closely linked to the trans movement that believes sex is fluid.
It’s not, she asserted. “No one can change their sex.”
“This has been one of the most reckless medical experiments of the modern era,” said Reed.
A Cure for Homosexuality
In the early 20th century, scientists developed synthetic sex hormones that could supplement or suppress natural hormone production, enabling them to treat serious endocrine disorders and intersex conditions.
They were also used to treat homosexuality.
Researchers believed gay men lacked sufficient testosterone and lesbian women lacked sufficient estrogen. Both theories have been debunked, but it opened the door to new uses of the hormones.
American G.I. Christine Jorgensen gained notoriety in the 1950s for undergoing chemical and surgical transition in Denmark because the medical procedure was illegal in the United States. Jorgensen’s surgeon received hundreds of letters requesting the same procedure.
“Every single letter he received from a female was a lesbian. Most of the men were homosexuals. A very small number were motivated by a sexual fetish,” said Reed.
“Adult gays and lesbians who wanted to escape the persecution that they faced tried to change their bodies, and a small number of heterosexual men were seeking to act out a paraphilic desire under the banner of identity.”
Universities began opening gender identity programs for adults in the 1960s and 70s, but almost all of them closed within a decade because “they had no good, long term outcomes,” according to Reed.
“They still had unresolved psychological distress and there were major ethical concerns,” she said.
The same questions were asked in Europe, which were also seeing poor results among transitioners.
“Instead of coming to the conclusion that we as a society need to come to now, that no one can change their sex and that society should stop persecuting gender nonconforming people and homosexuals, the doctors in the Netherlands came up with a brilliant idea. They decided that maybe we got it wrong because we didn’t do it early enough.”
Proliferation of Gender Affirming Clinics
In the 1990s, a hospital in Amsterdam launched an experiment that involved 70 children. They were given puberty blockers, introduced cross sex hormones, and underwent sex-reassignment surgery at around age 18.
One child died from surgical complications after developing an infection, but the study was still published as a success.
“Of those 70 children, 68 were homosexuals or profoundly gender nonconforming young people who, in any earlier generation, would have simply grown up to be gay or lesbian adults,” said Reed.
“Nearly every adult homosexual that I know can recall feeling as a child, ‘I wish I was the other sex.’ I remember thinking, I should have been born a boy, but that feeling usually disappears when puberty starts to clarify sexual orientation. What the Dutch did was they interrupted the normal developmental phase of same-sex attraction and set the stage for what came next. This protocol spread through English-speaking countries like wildfire.”
Boston Children’s Hospital launched “Gender Management Services” in 2007. By the mid-2010s, there were dozens of hospital-affiliated pediatric gender programs nationwide.
Social Media, DEI Create “Perfect Storm”
There was an add-on that Reed describes as a “perfect storm.” Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, where identity became the “moral and professional capital,” proliferated across social media and smartphones now in teenagers’ hands. Reed saw a massive increase in patients, most of them adolescent girls.
“When I started in 2018, I had four new patients come in each month. Most of them were little boys. They were gentle. They were feminine. They tried on their mom’s high heels. These were probably protogay boys who were making their parents uncomfortable. Left alone, most of them would have grown up to be gay men.”
“By the time I left in 2022, I had 60 new patients per month. Eighty percent of them were teenage girls. They were anxious, isolated and socially influenced,” said Reed.
During lockdowns, teens “became immersed in a world that rewarded self diagnosis and identity performance.”
Things came to a head for Reed professionally when she disagreed with an education specialist hired by the university to visit schools and educate staff, teachers and parents about gender. A referral came for a teenage girl who said she was nonbinary, asked for testosterone, but wanted to keep her feminine girl name. The girl’s therapist questioned whether the girl truly knew who she was. The girl’s father wanted the therapist removed. This led to a conflict between Reed and the education specialist.
Reed prepared an exit plan.
“How did conservatives end up getting something so critical so right?”
After transferring to another department, Reed submitted an article to The Free Press and met with the Missouri state attorney.
Within six months, Missouri closed all of its gender centers.
Within two years, Reed’s testimony helped close gender centers in Texas, Indiana, Tennessee, South Carolina, Kansas, Ohio, West Virginia and New Hampshire.
“How did conservatives end up getting something so critical so right?” she asked the audience.
“You refuse to accept that a healthy child’s body should be a blank canvas for social theory. You refused to bow to medical organizations that simply declared that they were above question. You insisted on evidence… and you held the line on the ancient truth that children deserve protection.”
“This is the greatest failure of the Democratic Party that I will know in my lifetime… The Democratic Party handed the authority of children’s bodies to obey medical institutions, highly ideological nonprofits and social media identity culture, and while they did that, they turned around and told parents to shut up and comply.”
“If I could change, others can too.”
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Excellent article. I believe kids are born in the right body. Transitioning kids sets them up for horrible psychological problems in their futures. No child should be mutilated. Let them make that decision as an adult.