Morally and Medically Appalling: Jamie Reed blows the whistle on youth gender medicine

The Unspeakable Podcast

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.8 • 784 Ratings

🗓️ 29 July 2024

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This is a premium episode with Jamie Reed.This episode is available to paid listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here.

Jamie will be in The Unspeakeasy as part of our Unspeakers Series on Aug. 7, 2024. Apply to join The Unspeakeasy now if you want the chance to meet her in a private, off-the-record hangout.

“What is happening to scores of children . . . is morally and medically appalling.” Those were the words of Jamie Reed, a former case manager at a gender clinic in a major American children’s hospital, when she burst on the scene via a Free Press article in February 2023. Since then, she has become known as the most prominent whistleblower in the effort to put the brakes on medicalized gender transition for kids.

In this conversation, Jamie talks about what the last year and a half has been like for her, what the public still needs to understand about this issue, and why doctors and other medical providers are continuing to misrepresent their treatment protocols. She discusses how institutions serving the most vulnerable kids, including foster care systems (where large numbers of kids now identify as trans), have adopted affirmative care models and explains what it’s like to

Testify before state legislatures about restricting access to non-evidence-based gender-affirming care. As a self-described “queer woman who’s married to a transgender person and is politically to the left of Bernie Sanders,” it’s the last thing she ever thought she’d be doing. Now it’s her life’s work.

GUEST BIO

Jamie Reed is one of the first public whistleblowers from a pediatric gender clinic in the United States and is now the Executive Director and Co-Founder of the LGBT Courage Coalition, an American-based non-profit of LGBT adults seeking to reform youth gender medicine. She has spoken at numerous conferences including Genspect: The Bigger Picture in Colorado, at the International Perspectives on Evidence- Based Treatment for Gender-Dysphoric Youth in New York, and Psychotherapeutic Process with Young People Experiencing Gender Dysphoria in Tampere, Finland.

Jamie is a gay woman and foster and adoptive parent of five boys. She holds a Master of Science in Clinical Research from Washington University in St. Louis and a bachelor’s degree in Cultural Anthropology.

Read the original story in The Free Press here.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	we have all of these systems in the U.S. that are still marching forward towards, you know,
0:11.1	trans kids need medical care and trans kids exist and trans kids need to be affirmed.
0:16.6	And our foster systems and our court systems and our divorce systems, all these systems are still
0:22.0	marching to the beat of that drum, while some of the rest of us are going, there's the biggest
0:28.8	medical scandal in our lifetime going on around us.
0:35.8	Welcome to the unspeakable podcast. I'm your host, Megan Down. This is a premium episode of the podcast with guest Jamie Reed, whose voice you just heard. Jamie showed up on many people's radars in February of last year when she published a story in the free press entitled, I thought I was saving trans kids.
0:56.2	Now I'm blowing the whistle.
0:58.0	She described herself as a 42-year-old St. Louis native, a queer woman who was politically
1:03.8	to the left of Bernie Sanders.
1:05.5	She then went on to describe the four years she worked as a case manager at the Washington University Transgender
1:12.5	Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital and what she saw as significant medical malpractice
1:19.1	when it came to evaluating and treating gender dysporic kids. Now, if you follow this issue,
1:24.9	you probably know at least some of Jamie's story. But I brought
1:28.3	her on because I wanted to hear what her life has been like over the last year and a half.
1:33.1	She now regularly testifies before state legislatures about restricting access to non-evidence-based
1:39.7	gender affirming care, which is something that, as a queer woman, married to a transgender person,
1:45.5	she never thought she'd be doing. In this conversation, we also talk about the way this issue is
1:51.2	handled in the foster care system, where a huge number of kids are now assuming trans identities.
1:57.2	If you are not yet a paying subscriber, you're going to get a taste of the conversation.
2:01.6	If you want to hear the rest, go to megandaum.substack.com.
2:06.6	That's M-E-G-H-A-N-D-A-U-M and become a paying subscriber.
2:11.2	You get to hear the entire conversation every week.
	...

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