How did we let our children get manipulated and mutilated like this?
That’s going to be the question future generations ask about 2023, and the years preceding it, when doctors across America doled out hormones like they were Halloween candy and even in some cases removed minors’ functional body parts.
Don’t take my word for it. Jamie Reed, who describes herself as a “progressive” and who says she is “married to a transman,” wrote a terrifying account of her experience while working at a Midwestern medical center focused on transgenderism.
In her explosive article in The Free Press, Reed, who was formerly employed at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, describes a world where medical professionals rushed to encourage minors’ gender transitions, without any concern about the life-changing consequences of the treatments.
“Many encounters with patients emphasized to me how little these young people understood the profound impacts changing gender would have on their bodies and minds,” writes Reed. “But the center downplayed the negative consequences, and emphasized the need for transition.”
Reed’s expose comes at a time when, thankfully, lawmakers are beginning to realize that we can’t count on doctors to protect our children. Lawmakers in Georgia, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Kansas have introduced legislation that would put limits on gender transition “treatments” for minors. In Utah, Republican Gov. Spencer Cox just signed legislation banning surgeries and hormone treatment for minors.
This surge comes after a growing awareness of the issue. In 2021, Arkansas banned hormones and gender transition surgeries for minors, and a year later, Alabama followed suit. Arizona bans gender transition surgeries for minors, and in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott declared that certain gender transition medical interventions for minors could be considered child abuse and parents could be investigated and risk losing custody of their children.
Reed’s account makes it clear how crucial such laws are to protecting our kids.
At the Washington University Transgender Center, minors only needed to have seen a therapist twice, an endocrinologist once, and have a letter from a therapist to begin transitioning.
Don’t think that those three medical visits and letter provided any kind of real roadblock or opportunity for thoughtful discernment: Reed writes that the Transgender Center often referred patients to specific therapists and even provided a template letter for the therapists.
This fast track becomes even more concerning when you consider the minors coming to the center. Reed says they were often suffering from “depression, anxiety, ADHD, eating disorders, obesity” and “were diagnosed with autism, or had autism-like symptoms.”
Minors also suffered very real consequences as a result of the “treatments.” Reed writes of one minor patient suffering liver toxicity from a drug used to “block” puberty. Other consequences proved even more horrifying: One girl on testosterone called, saying she was experiencing vaginal bleeding. “In less than an hour she had soaked through an extra heavy pad, her jeans, and a towel she had wrapped around her waist,” Reed recounts.
What had happened? During sex, the young woman’s vaginal canal had ripped—testosterone apparently thins the vaginal tissues.
Reed counseled another young woman on testosterone. As a result of the hormone, her clitoris became “enlarged” and “now extended below her vulva, and it chafed and rubbed painfully in her jeans.” Reed advised her to wear compression garments. “At the end of the call I thought to myself, ‘Wow, we hurt this kid,’” she recalls.
An 18-year-old woman, who had been taking hormones since she was around 16 and who “came from an unstable family, was in an uncertain living situation, and had a history of drug use,” had her breasts removed in surgery. Three months later, she announced she was going back to she/her pronouns and told a nurse, “I want my breasts back.”
Reed relays her growing concern over how children were being treated. She was alarmed to see how the number of patients per month increased over time, and that sometimes new patients would include a group of girls from the same high school. But she was afraid to mention to the rest of the team her worries about social contagion: “Anyone who raised doubts ran the risk of being called a transphobe.”
In 2019, Reed learned about detransitioners—people who began the physical gender transition process, and then stop—and desisters, people who were considering a gender transition, but ultimately do not go through the process. She and another colleague assumed that the doctors would be interested in tracking whether patients desisted or detransitioned.
But: “We were wrong,” writes Reed. “One doctor wondered aloud why he would spend time on someone who was no longer his patient.”
Talk about a compassionate response.
Washington University of St. Louis issued a statement that it was “alarmed” over the allegations in Reed’s article: “We are taking this matter very seriously and have already begun the process of looking into the situation to ascertain the facts.” Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican, announced that an investigation into the Washington University Transgender Center: “We take this evidence seriously and are thoroughly investigating to make sure children are not harmed by individuals who may be more concerned with a radical social agenda than the health of children,” he said in a statement.
But for many children, it’s already too late.
The corporate media’s glowing coverage of transgender treatments for minors has allowed this madness to flourish. “Puberty blockers” sounds so much less concerning than cancer drugs prescribed off label that may cause sterilization. “Gender-affirming surgeries” sounds very different than “breast removal surgery,” or dare I say, “genital mutilation surgery.”
Minors do not have the maturity to make these decisions that will haunt the rest of their lives. Just consider Chloe Cole, who had a double mastectomy at 15. A year later, she learned in a phsycology class about how breastfeeding played a “role in the bond between mother and child, and that bond goes on to affect that child’s later cognitive and emotional and social functioning,” she told my colleague Virginia Allen.
“Upon reading this, I felt like a monster,” Cole added. “I realized that I took something not only [from] myself, but also potentially from my future children. I think that’s when the realization really hit that I shouldn’t have been allowed to go through this.”
She’s right: She shouldn’t have been allowed. Let’s hope we’re moving toward an America where fewer teens will be regretting their childhood decisions to permanently mutilate their bodies.
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