[CLIP] The Truth About Gender Clinics: Whistleblower Jamie Reed

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 um 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 you know 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 um just something that you would be really good at and so I applied I started um that would have been around 2018 the center had only been open for a year um 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 um become their truth selves and embody their their truth that's interesting right because this 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 a signed at Birth which I find I find that phraseology frankly highly problematic but um yeah that if you were if you deal with that early then you'll have a healthy happy person on the other side that's that's the core so would you agree yeah that's the core idea behind the uh the whole concept yes and everything I've been learning and about this over the last several years tells me the opposite is true yes it 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 the center the history of how this developed out of something called The Dutch protocol call um that came out of the Netherlands um 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 in a pediatric child's body and as you you know 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 the treatment there just weren't holding water so one of the things that's in your affidavit is that I believe is that in the Dutch model um they excluded young people with these psychiatric comorbidities whereas in the scenario that you were working almost every prospective patient had the serious psychiatric comorbidities yeah yeah so the Dutch were excluding individuals with severe or um 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 called 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 um 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 um uh family history um in medicine you want to not only trust but verify so if somebody tells me I have been 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 p nutrition about I'm concerned about my child's gender presentation or a kindergarten teacher you know there's nothing documenting this these are really um a significant number of teens who are coming forward at 1516 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 you you mentioned you you believed you were stepping into something that could be helpful right to to to young people I think but just explain to me the the 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 um they're newer in these fields one of our one of our doctors was directly out of residency and he was named a co-director and there is an intentional practice of hiring in 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 um creates these These Feelings where you cannot go against these narratives because you're not just you're you're going against your own tribe you're going against your own people if you 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 by 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 by 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 girl like where 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 which by all 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 find comfort with in my own gender and sex um we're taking these decisions and we're taking this away from children if there's anything we've learned about the from the last few years is this power of social Conformity or the power of the need to belong overcoming FR frankly in a lot of cases rationality yeah right so I kind of I'm kind of beginning to get a sense of how this works but the the the effects as you pointed out moments ago on these kids are a life of suffering I mean that's not over simplifying it is it like 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 um somehow the sacred the unable to be questioned don't forget to subscribe to our alerts newsletter and you'll never miss an episode