Doctors disregarded parents’ rights, pushed kids into sex changes

By Laurel Duggan
Daily Caller News Foundation

Jamie Reed, a former case manager at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, said the clinic rushes children into irreversible sex change procedures, often against the wishes of parents, in a Thursday article in The Free Press.

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Reed, a self-identified “queer” woman who is married to a transgender person, worked at the clinic from 2018 until November 2022, during which time she became increasingly concerned about children being rushed onto cross-sex hormones with irreversible consequences, according to the FP. About 1,000 distressed youths came to the clinic while Reed worked there, and most of them received hormones, she wrote.

“By the time I departed, I was certain that the way the American medical system is treating these patients is the opposite of the promise we make to ‘do no harm.’ Instead, we are permanently harming the vulnerable patients in our care.”

Doctors tended to disregard parental rights and saw themselves as more informed decision-makers when it came to children’s medical decisions, Reed wrote. Missouri law only requires one parent to consent to the procedures for a minor, but when parents disagreed, the clinic always seemed to side with the parent who wanted the child to undergo a gender transition.

In one case, a mother who suspected that her 11-year-old daughter was transgender called the clinic and said her daughter was “kind of a tomboy,” but because the child had not adopted a male name and was not experiencing distress about her body or saying she felt like a boy, she did not qualify for an evaluation at the clinic, according to Reed.

A month later, the same woman called to report that her daughter had taken on a boy’s name, was experiencing distress about her body and wanted to transition; the clinic then determined the child was transgender and put her on puberty blockers, Reed wrote.

The child’s father opposed her transition, resulting in a custody battle in which a clinic doctor testified in favor of transition, and the judge sided with the mother, according to Reed. Reed expressed concern about the case in an email to an unnamed staffer.

“The Judge could have awarded the medical decision making to the Dad or awarded legal custody to the Dad,” she wrote. “Instead the Judge put in the Center’s hands the decision making for medical transition. And this is a patient who is not yet 16.”

The cross-sex drugs being prescribed at the clinic can cause in infertility, liver toxicity, painful clitoral enlargement and vaginal laceration, but parents and patients were surprised by these side effects, Reed wrote, which suggests they may not have been fully informed.

“I doubt that any parent who’s ever consented to give their kid testosterone (a lifelong treatment) knows that they’re also possibly signing their kid up for blood pressure medication, cholesterol medication, and perhaps sleep apnea and diabetes,” Reed wrote.

One mother told the clinic they were lucky she wasn’t the type to sue after her son, who was taking the cancer drug Bicalutamide to feminize his body, had a hospital evaluation for liver toxicity, according to Reed. Another mother revoked her consent for her child’s medical transition over email, saying her child was “a shell of his former self” and was experiencing declining grades and behavioral health issues while on five different medications.

The clinic saw a five-fold increase in patient inquiries during Reed’s tenure, and many of the new patients were girls with sudden onset gender issues or children with mental health issues, she wrote.

Prior to 2015 the clinic mainly saw boys who wanted to become girls, but saw a sudden surge in adolescent girls with no history of gender distress suddenly adopting transgender identities and seeking medical transition starting around 2015, according to Reed, who suspected social contagion was at play. Many of these girls had depression, anxiety, ADHD, eating disorders or were obese. Sometimes groups of girls from the same high school would present at the clinic seeking medical transitions.

Many patients claimed to have conditions such as Tourette syndrome, tic disorders or multiple personality disorder when they actually didn’t, which doctors recognized as a result of social contagion, but doctors did not consider the possibility that transgender identities had the same cause, according to Reed.

The clinic also saw a surge in patients from the inpatient psychiatric unit with diagnoses like schizophrenia, PTSD and bipolar disorder, according to Reed.

“No matter how much suffering or pain a child had endured, or how little treatment and love they had received, our doctors viewed gender transition—even with all the expense and hardship it entailed—as the solution,” Reed wrote.

Reed called for the hormonal and surgical treatment of young people with gender dysphoria to be halted and for the U.S. to follow the path of the U.K., which shut down its massive pediatric gender clinic following in in-depth investigation that found insufficient safeguarding of children and plans to replace it with smaller clinics focused on mental health counseling.

Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley pledged to investigate the clinic Thursday morning.

The Washington University Transgender Center did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.