MO - AG investigates St. Louis Transgender Center on whistleblower affidavit

[Occam's Banana]

See this post below for (1) a link to the affidavit of Jamie Reed (the author of the following article at The Free Press), and (2) the Missouri Attorney General's press release announcing its investigation of the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital.

I Thought I Was Saving Trans Kids. Now I’m Blowing the Whistle.
There are more than 100 pediatric gender clinics across the U.S. I worked at one. What’s happening to children is morally and medically appalling.
https://www.thefp.com/p/i-thought-i-was-saving-trans-kids
Jamie Reed (09 February 2023)

I am a 42-year-old St. Louis native, a queer woman, and politically to the left of Bernie Sanders. My worldview has deeply shaped my career. I have spent my professional life providing counseling to vulnerable populations: children in foster care, sexual minorities, the poor.

For almost four years, I worked at The Washington University School of Medicine Division of Infectious Diseases with teens and young adults who were HIV positive. Many of them were trans or otherwise gender nonconforming, and I could relate: Through childhood and adolescence, I did a lot of gender questioning myself. I’m now married to a transman, and together we are raising my two biological children from a previous marriage and three foster children we hope to adopt.

All that led me to a job in 2018 as a case manager at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital, which had been established a year earlier.

The center’s working assumption was that the earlier you treat kids with gender dysphoria, the more anguish you can prevent later on. This premise was shared by the center’s doctors and therapists. Given their expertise, I assumed that abundant evidence backed this consensus.

During the four years I worked at the clinic as a case manager—I was responsible for patient intake and oversight—around a thousand distressed young people came through our doors. The majority of them received hormone prescriptions that can have life-altering consequences—including sterility.

I left the clinic in November of last year because I could no longer participate in what was happening there. 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.

Today I am speaking out. I am doing so knowing how toxic the public conversation is around this highly contentious issue—and the ways that my testimony might be misused. I am doing so knowing that I am putting myself at serious personal and professional risk.

Almost everyone in my life advised me to keep my head down. But I cannot in good conscience do so. Because what is happening to scores of children is far more important than my comfort. And what is happening to them is morally and medically appalling.

The Floodgates Open

 

Soon after my arrival at the Transgender Center, I was struck by the lack of formal protocols for treatment. The center’s physician co-directors were essentially the sole authority.

At first, the patient population was tipped toward what used to be the “traditional” instance of a child with gender dysphoria: a boy, often quite young, who wanted to present as—who wanted to be—a girl.

Until 2015 or so, a very small number of these boys comprised the population of pediatric gender dysphoria cases. Then, across the Western world, there began to be a dramatic increase in a new population: Teenage girls, many with no previous history of gender distress, suddenly declared they were transgender and demanded immediate treatment with testosterone.

I certainly saw this at the center. One of my jobs was to do intake for new patients and their families. When I started there were probably 10 such calls a month. When I left there were 50, and about 70 percent of the new patients were girls. Sometimes clusters of girls arrived from the same high school.

This concerned me, but didn’t feel I was in the position to sound some kind of alarm back then. There was a team of about eight of us, and only one other person brought up the kinds of questions I had. Anyone who raised doubts ran the risk of being called a transphobe.

The girls who came to us had many comorbidities: depression, anxiety, ADHD, eating disorders, obesity. Many were diagnosed with autism, or had autism-like symptoms. A report last year on a British pediatric transgender center found that about one-third of the patients referred there were on the autism spectrum.

Frequently, our patients declared they had disorders that no one believed they had. We had patients who said they had Tourette syndrome (but they didn’t); that they had tic disorders (but they didn’t); that they had multiple personalities (but they didn’t).

The doctors privately recognized these false self-diagnoses as a manifestation of social contagion. They even acknowledged that suicide has an element of social contagion. But when I said the clusters of girls streaming into our service looked as if their gender issues might be a manifestation of social contagion, the doctors said gender identity reflected something innate.

To begin transitioning, the girls needed a letter of support from a therapist—usually one we recommended—who they had to see only once or twice for the green light. To make it more efficient for the therapists, we offered them a template for how to write a letter in support of transition. The next stop was a single visit to the endocrinologist for a testosterone prescription.

That’s all it took.

When a female takes testosterone, the profound and permanent effects of the hormone can be seen in a matter of months. Voices drop, beards sprout, body fat is redistributed. Sexual interest explodes, aggression increases, and mood can be unpredictable. Our patients were told about some side effects, including sterility. But after working at the center, I came to believe that teenagers are simply not capable of fully grasping what it means to make the decision to become infertile while still a minor.

Side Effects

 

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. But the center downplayed the negative consequences, and emphasized the need for transition. As the center’s website said, “Left untreated, gender dysphoria has any number of consequences, from self-harm to suicide. But when you take away the gender dysphoria by allowing a child to be who he or she is, we’re noticing that goes away. The studies we have show these kids often wind up functioning psychosocially as well as or better than their peers.”

There are no reliable studies showing this. Indeed, the experiences of many of the center’s patients prove how false these assertions are.

Here’s an example. On Friday, May 1, 2020, a colleague emailed me about a 15-year-old male patient: “Oh dear. I am concerned that [the patient] does not understand what Bicalutamide does.” I responded: “I don’t think that we start anything honestly right now.”

​

Bicalutamide is a medication used to treat metastatic prostate cancer, and one of its side effects is that it feminizes the bodies of men who take it, including the appearance of breasts. The center prescribed this cancer drug as a puberty blocker and feminizing agent for boys. As with most cancer drugs, bicalutamide has a long list of side effects, and this patient experienced one of them: liver toxicity. He was sent to another unit of the hospital for evaluation and immediately taken off the drug. Afterward, his mother sent an electronic message to the Transgender Center saying that we were lucky her family was not the type to sue.

How little patients understood what they were getting into was illustrated by a call we received at the center in 2020 from a 17-year-old biological female patient who was on testosterone. She said she was bleeding from the vagina. In less than an hour she had soaked through an extra heavy pad, her jeans, and a towel she had wrapped around her waist. The nurse at the center told her to go to the emergency room right away.

We found out later this girl had had intercourse, and because testosterone thins the vaginal tissues, her vaginal canal had ripped open. She had to be sedated and given surgery to repair the damage. She wasn’t the only vaginal laceration case we heard about.

Other girls were disturbed by the effects of testosterone on their clitoris, which enlarges and grows into what looks like a microphallus, or a tiny penis. I counseled one patient whose enlarged clitoris now extended below her vulva, and it chafed and rubbed painfully in her jeans. I advised her to get the kind of compression undergarments worn by biological men who dress to pass as female. At the end of the call I thought to myself, “Wow, we hurt this kid.”

There are rare conditions in which babies are born with atypical genitalia—cases that call for sophisticated care and compassion. But clinics like the one where I worked are creating a whole cohort of kids with atypical genitals—and most of these teens haven’t even had sex yet. They had no idea who they were going to be as adults. Yet all it took for them to permanently transform themselves was one or two short conversations with a therapist.

Being put on powerful doses of testosterone or estrogen—enough to try to trick your body into mimicking the opposite sex—-affects the rest of the body. 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.

But sometimes the parents’ understanding of what they had agreed to do to their children came forcefully:

​

Neglected and Mentally Ill Patients

 

Besides teenage girls, another new group was referred to us: young people from the inpatient psychiatric unit, or the emergency department, of St. Louis Children’s Hospital. The mental health of these kids was deeply concerning—there were diagnoses like schizophrenia, PTSD, bipolar disorder, and more. Often they were already on a fistful of pharmaceuticals.

This was tragic, but unsurprising given the profound trauma some had been through. Yet 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.

Some weeks it felt as though almost our entire caseload was nothing but disturbed young people.

For example, one teenager came to us in the summer of 2022 when he was 17 years old and living in a lockdown facility because he had been sexually abusing dogs. He’d had an awful childhood: His mother was a drug addict, his father was imprisoned, and he grew up in foster care. Whatever treatment he may have been getting, it wasn’t working.

During our intake I learned from another caseworker that when he got out, he planned to reoffend because he believed the dogs had willingly submitted.

Somewhere along the way, he expressed a desire to become female, so he ended up being seen at our center. From there, he went to a psychologist at the hospital who was known to approve virtually everyone seeking transition. Then our doctor recommended feminizing hormones. At the time, I wondered if this was being done as a form of chemical castration.

That same thought came up again with another case. This one was in spring of 2022 and concerned a young man who had intense obsessive-compulsive disorder that manifested as a desire to cut off his penis after he masturbated. This patient expressed no gender dysphoria, but he got hormones, too. I asked the doctor what protocol he was following, but I never got a straight answer.

In Loco Parentis

 

Another disturbing aspect of the center was its lack of regard for the rights of parents—and the extent to which doctors saw themselves as more informed decision-makers over the fate of these children.

In Missouri, only one parent’s consent is required for treatment of their child. But when there was a dispute between the parents, it seemed the center always took the side of the affirming parent.

My concerns about this approach to dissenting parents grew in 2019 when one of our doctors actually testified in a custody hearing against a father who opposed a mother’s wish to start their 11-year-old daughter on puberty blockers.

I had done the original intake call, and I found the mother quite disturbing. She and the father were getting divorced, and the mother described the daughter as “kind of a tomboy.” So now the mother was convinced her child was trans. But when I asked if her daughter had adopted a boy’s name, if she was distressed about her body, if she was saying she felt like a boy, the mother said no. I explained the girl just didn’t meet the criteria for an evaluation.

Then a month later, the mother called back and said her daughter now used a boy’s name, was in distress over her body, and wanted to transition. This time the mom and daughter were given an appointment. Our providers decided the girl was trans and prescribed a puberty blocker to prevent her normal development.

The father adamantly disagreed, said this was all coming from the mother, and a custody battle ensued. After the hearing where our doctor testified in favor of transition, the judge sided with the mother.

​

‘I Want My Breasts Back’

 

Because I was the main intake person, I had the broadest perspective on our existing and prospective patients. In 2019, a new group of people appeared on my radar: desisters and detransitioners. Desisters choose not to go through with a transition. Detransitioners are transgender people who decide to return to their birth gender.

The one colleague with whom I was able to share my concerns agreed with me that we should be tracking desistance and detransition. We thought the doctors would want to collect and understand this data in order to figure out what they had missed.

We were wrong. One doctor wondered aloud why he would spend time on someone who was no longer his patient.

But we created a document anyway and called it the Red Flag list. It was an Excel spreadsheet that tracked the kind of patients that kept my colleague and me up at night.

One of the saddest cases of detransition I witnessed was a teenage girl, who, like so many of our patients, came from an unstable family, was in an uncertain living situation, and had a history of drug use. The overwhelming majority of our patients are white, but this girl was black. She was put on hormones at the center when she was around 16. When she was 18, she went in for a double mastectomy, what’s known as “top surgery.”

Three months later she called the surgeon’s office to say she was going back to her birth name and that her pronouns were “she” and “her.” Heartbreakingly, she told the nurse, “I want my breasts back.” The surgeon’s office contacted our office because they didn’t know what to say to this girl.

My colleague and I said that we would reach out. It took a while to track her down, and when we did we made sure that she was in decent mental health, that she was not actively suicidal, that she was not using substances. The last I heard, she was pregnant. Of course, she’ll never be able to breastfeed her child.

‘Get On Board, Or Get Out’

 

My concerns about what was going on at the center started to overtake my life. By spring 2020, I felt a medical and moral obligation to do something. So I spoke up in the office, and sent plenty of emails.

Here’s just one example: On January 6, 2022, I received an email from a staff therapist asking me for help with a case of a 16-year-old transgender male living in another state. “Parents are open to having patient see a therapist but are not supportive of gender and patient does not want parents to be aware of gender identity. I am having a challenging time finding a gender affirming therapist.”

I replied:

“I do not ethically agree with linking a minor patient to a therapist who would be gender affirming with gender as a focus of their work without that being discussed with the parents and the parent agreeing to that kind of care.”

​

In all my years at the Washington University School of Medicine, I had received solidly positive performance reviews. But in 2021, that changed. I got a below-average mark for my “Judgment” and “Working Relationships/Cooperative Spirit.” Although I was described as “responsible, conscientious, hard-working and productive” the evaluation also noted: “At times Jamie responds poorly to direction from management with defensiveness and hostility.”

Things came to a head at a half-day retreat in summer of 2022. In front of the team, the doctors said that my colleague and I had to stop questioning the “medicine and the science” as well as their authority. Then an administrator told us we had to “Get on board, or get out.” It became clear that the purpose of the retreat was to deliver these messages to us.

The Washington University system provides a generous college tuition payment program for long-standing employees. I live by my paycheck and have no money to put aside for five college tuitions for my kids. I had to keep my job. I also feel a lot of loyalty to Washington University.

But I decided then and there that I had to get out of the Transgender Center, and to do so, I had to keep my head down and improve my next performance review.

I managed to get a decent evaluation, and I landed a job conducting research in another part of The Washington University School of Medicine. I gave my notice and left the Transgender Center in November of 2022.

What I Want to See Happen

 

For a couple of weeks, I tried to put everything behind me and settled into my new job as a clinical research coordinator, managing studies regarding children undergoing bone marrow transplants.

Then I came across comments from Dr. Rachel Levine, a transgender woman who is a high official at the federal Department of Health and Human Services. The article read: “Levine, the U.S. assistant secretary for health, said that clinics are proceeding carefully and that no American children are receiving drugs or hormones for gender dysphoria who shouldn’t.”

I felt stunned and sickened. It wasn’t true. And I know that from deep first-hand experience.

So I started writing down everything I could about my experience at the Transgender Center. Two weeks ago, I brought my concerns and documents to the attention of Missouri’s attorney general. He is a Republican. I am a progressive. But the safety of children should not be a matter for our culture wars.

Click here to read Jamie Reed’s letter to the Missouri AG [PDF file]
​

Given the secrecy and lack of rigorous standards that characterize youth gender transition across the country, I believe that to ensure the safety of American children, we need a moratorium on the hormonal and surgical treatment of young people with gender dysphoria.

In the past 15 years, according to Reuters, the U.S. has gone from having no pediatric gender clinics to more than 100. A thorough analysis should be undertaken to find out what has been done to their patients and why—and what the long-term consequences are.

There is a clear path for us to follow. Just last year England shut down the Tavistock Centre, the only youth gender clinic in the country, after an investigation revealed shoddy practices and poor patient treatment. Sweden and Finland, too, have investigated pediatric transition and greatly curbed the practice, finding there is insufficient evidence of help, and danger of great harm.

Some critics describe the kind of treatment offered at places like the Transgender Center where I worked as a kind of national experiment. But that’s wrong.

Experiments are supposed to be carefully designed. Hypotheses are supposed to be tested ethically. The doctors I worked alongside at the Transgender Center said frequently about the treatment of our patients: “We are building the plane while we are flying it.” No one should be a passenger on that kind of aircraft.

 

[Brian4Liberty]

First, follow the money. Then you can follow the politics. The best and most appropriate care for individuals is very low on the list of priorities.

 

[Occam's Banana]

https://twitter.com/AGAndrewBailey/status/1623803010898952194

[additional matter hidden to save space]

 

 

[Occam's Banana]

PDF file: Affidavit of Jamie Reed

Missouri Attorney General Confirms Launch of Multi-Agency Investigation into St. Louis Transgender Center
https://ago.mo.gov/home/news/2023/0...ender-center-for-harming-hundreds-of-children
Missouri Attorney General (09 February 2023)

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – Now that the whistleblower has gone public with her allegations about the Pediatric Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey confirms that two weeks ago the Attorney General’s Office began a full investigation into these shocking allegations. The Office has already received a sworn affidavit from the whistleblower and documents that support her allegations. The Missouri Department of Social Services and Division of Professional Registration are assisting the investigation.

“As Attorney General, I want Missouri to be the safest state in the nation for children,” said Attorney General Andrew Bailey. “We have received disturbing allegations that individuals at the Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital have been harming hundreds of children each year, including by using experimental drugs on them. 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.”

“The Division of Professional Registration and its 41 licensing boards license over 525,000 Missourians in more than 300 professions. Importantly, the Division and its boards’ mission is the protection of the public, especially those most vulnerable,” said Sheila Solon, Director, Division of Professional Registration. “The Division’s licensing boards will investigate the complaints they receive as part of this investigation, and take any necessary action against the licenses of Missouri professionals in violation of the boards’ statutory and regulatory authority to ensure health, safety and welfare of the citizens of Missouri.”

"The Department of Social Services takes its role to investigate concerns of potential fraud, waste, or abuse in Missouri's Medicaid program seriously,” said Robert Knodell, Acting Director, Department of Social Services. “We will investigate concerns raised in order to ensure the health and safety of our Medicaid participants and to protect the integrity of the Medicaid program."

So that parents are fully aware of the nature of these allegations, the Attorney General’s Office is releasing the whistleblower’s full, sworn affidavit. The sworn affidavit asserts, among other things, that individuals at the Center are using experimental drugs on children, distributing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones without individualized assessment, and even giving children these life-altering drugs without parental consent. The whistleblower says that the actions taken by the Center have led children to attempt suicide and that the Center never discontinues prescribing cross-sex hormones, no matter how much those drugs are harming the child. The whistleblower also has provided documentary evidence that the Center has been unlawfully billing state taxpayers to fund these actions.

Specific allegations include:

• “On several occasions, the doctors have continued prescribing medical transition even when a parent stated that they were revoking consent.”
• “The Center does not require children to continue with mental health care after they prescribe cross-sex hormones or puberty blockers and even continues those medications when the patients directly report worsening mental health after initiating those medications “
• “I have seen puberty blockers worsen the mental health outcomes of children. Children who have not contemplated suicide before being put on puberty blockers have attempted suicide after.”
• “It is my belief that the Center does not track these outcomes because they do not want to have to report them to new patients and because they do not want to discontinue cross-sex hormone prescriptions. The Center never discontinues cross-sex hormones, no matter the outcome.”
• “During my time at the Center, I personally witnessed Center healthcare providers lie to the public and to parents of patients about the treatment, or lack of treatment, and the effects of treatment provided to children at the Center.”
• “Doctors at the Center also have publicly claimed that they do not do any gender transition surgeries on minors. … This was a lie. The Center regularly refers minors for gender transition surgery. The Center routinely gives out the names and contact information of surgeons to those under the age of 18. At least one gender transition surgery was performed by Dr. Allison Snyder-Warwick at St. Louis Children’s Hospital in the last few years.”
• “The Center tells the public and parents of patients that the point of puberty blockers is to give children time to figure out their gender identity. But the Center does not use puberty blockers for this purpose. Instead, the Center uses puberty blockers just until children are old enough to be put on cross-sex hormones. Doctors at the Center always prescribe cross-sex hormones for children who have been taking puberty blockers.”
• “The Center tells the public and parents that it makes individualized decisions. That is not true. Doctors at the Center believe that every child who meets four basic criteria—age or puberty stage, therapist letter, parental consent, and a one-hour visit with a doctor—is a good candidate for irreversible medical intervention. When a child meets these four simple criteria, the doctors always decide to move forward with puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones. There were no objective medical test or criteria or individualized assessments.”
• “One doctor at the Center, Dr. Chris Lewis, is giving patients a drug called Bicalutamide. The drug has a legitimate use for treating pancreatic cancer, but it has a side effect of causing breasts to grow, and it can poison the liver. There are no clinical studies for using this drug for gender transitions, and there are no established standards of care for using this drug.”
• “I know of at least one patient at the Center who was advised by the renal department to stop taking Bicalutamide because the child was experiencing liver damage. The child’s parent reported this to the Center through the patient’s online self-reporting medical chart (MyChart). The parent said they were not the type to sue, but ‘this could be a huge PR problem for you.’”
• “Children come into the clinic using pronouns of inanimate objects like ‘mushroom,’ ‘rock,’ or ‘helicopter.’ Children come into the clinic saying they want hormones because they do not want to be gay. Children come in changing their identities on a day-to-day basis. Children come in under clear pressure by a parent to identify in a way inconsistent with the child’s actual identity. In all these cases, the doctors decide to issue puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones.”
• “In one case where a girl was placed on cross-sex hormones, I found out later that the girl desired cross-sex hormones only because she wanted to avoid becoming pregnant. There was no need for this girl to be prescribed cross-sex hormones. What she needed was basic sex education and maybe contraception. An adequate assessment before prescribing hormones would have revealed this fact. But because the doctors automatically prescribe cross-sex hormones or puberty blockers for children meeting the bare minimum criteria, this girl was unnecessarily placed on drugs that cause irreversible change to the body.”
• “On another occasion, a patient had their breasts removed. This surgery was performed at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. Three months later, the patient contacted the surgeon and asked for their breasts to be ‘put back on.’ Had a requisite and adequate assessment been performed before the procedure, the doctors could have prevented this patient from undergoing irreversible surgical change.”
• “It is my belief that the Center does not track these outcomes because they do not want to have to report them to new patients and because they do not want to discontinue cross-sex hormone prescriptions. The Center never discontinues cross-sex hormones, no matter the outcome.”
• “In just a two-year period from 2020 to 2022, the Center initiated medical transition for more than 600 children. About 74% of these children were assigned female at birth. These procedures were paid for mostly by private insurance, but during this time, it is my understanding that the Center also billed the cost for these procedures to state and federal publicly funded insurance programs.”
• “I have personally witnessed staff say they were uncomfortable with how the Center has told them they have to code bills sent to publicly funded insurance programs. I have witnessed staff directly ask the providers for clarification on billing questions and have providers dismiss the concerns and work to have the patients have this care covered as the priority.”

 

[Occam's Banana]

https://twitter.com/peterboghossian/status/1623916040626520069

 

[Anti Federalist]

Utter, total, complete abominations.

No society, no nation can withstand this.

 

[Brian4Liberty]

Blatant medical malpractice and violation of the Hippocratic Oath. What is the penalty? How is it enforced? Who enforces it?

 

[Anti Federalist]

Blatant medical malpractice and violation of the Hippocratic Oath. What is the penalty? How is it enforced? Who enforces it?

Prosecute for fraud, misdiagnosis, failure to diagnose and theft by deception.

 

[tod evans]

Blatant medical malpractice and violation of the Hippocratic Oath. What is the penalty? How is it enforced? Who enforces it?

This is where "We the People" have dropped the ball.

Justice will not be found in their courts yet collectively we keep trying.

 

[Mach]

And remember, St. Louis Children's Hospital is connected to Barnes and Washington University, it is a worldwide place, they are all one big complex and take up 3-4 blocks, not including the actual University, and you can walk inside to everywhere.

https://www.google.com/maps/@38.6365762,-90.2640869,17z?hl=en

 

[Occam's Banana]

Related, from the UK:

Tavistock scandal ‘on a par with East German doping of athletes’
New book on NHS child gender clinic reveals how staff ‘regret’ routinely referring under-16s for puberty blockers
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/...-puberty-blockers-nhs-investigation-ghrqxk8pn
[archive link: https://archive.is/84iWT]
Glen Keogh (11 February 2023)

More than 1,000 children were referred for puberty blockers at an experimental gender clinic where concerns were ignored to preserve a “gold dust” NHS contract, a new book claims.

Former clinicians at the Gender Identity Development Service (Gids), part of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust in London, have detailed how some “incredibly complex” children were placed on medication after one face-to-face assessment, despite many having a variety of mental health or family background problems.

More than a third of young people referred to the service had moderate to severe autistic traits, compared with fewer than 2 per cent of children in the general population. Some identified not just as a different gender, but a different ethnic background, such as Japanese or Korean. One young person had “three different alter egos, two of whom spoke in an Australian accent”

In the book, former clinicians at the Gids service speak for the first time in detail of their “regret” about the practice of routinely referring under-16s for puberty-blocking and cross-hormone treatment with no concrete data on the long-term effects. They compare it to the Mid Staffs hospital scandal of the 2000s and the doping of East German athletes in the 1960s and 1970s.

The claims come in Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children by Hannah Barnes, which will be released this month.

[additional matter hidden to save space]

 

Barnes, a BBC Newsnight journalist, spoke to dozens of clinicians who worked at Gids, governors at the trust and children and their parents who used the service.

She details how:

• Children as young as three, already living as the opposite gender with a changed name, appearance and pronouns, were referred to the service.

• The clinic accounted for almost 30 per cent of the Tavistock NHS Trust’s income by 2021 and staff said it resembled a “tech start-up” with regular trips to international conferences.

• In 2016, Susie Green, former head of the pro-trans charity Mermaids, emailed Dr Polly Carmichael, who was then the head of Gids, asking to cut the time children had to spend on puberty blockers before irreversible cross-sex hormones could be introduced.

• Staff raised concerns when, on behalf of families, Green requested children’s clinicians to be changed to someone believed to be more likely to prescribe hormones.

• In her first interview since winning an employment tribunal case after she raised concerns about the safety of children, the trust’s head of safeguarding, Sonia Appleby, said anyone who spoke out was “demonised”.

• Former therapists involved in prescribing puberty blockers now admit they do not know “how many children [have since] changed their mind” on transitioning.
​

Founded in 1989, Gids, formerly the UK’s only dedicated gender identity clinic for children and young people, was told to shut last year after an independent review led by Dr Hilary Cass concluded that young people were left at “considerable risk” of poor mental health and distress. A Care Quality Commission report had rated the service “inadequate” and criticised its record-keeping.

Data shows 354 children under 16 consented to puberty blockers at University College London Hospital Trust and Leeds Children’s Hospital between 2012 and 2021 after being seen by therapists and psychologists at the clinic. Between 2009 and 2017, 1,261 children and teenagers were referred for medical intervention. Gids said the “vast majority” were prescribed the blocker.

After initially treating just a handful of patients each year, referrals to Gids increased dramatically. In 2009-10 it received 97. By 2019-20 it received 2,748 — a rise of more than 2,700 per cent. The youngest child known to have been referred to endocrinologists at the University College London Hospital Trust was seven. The child was later treated privately.

The numbers far exceeded what had been planned for and many staff members felt overwhelmed.

Therapists who worked at the clinic have spoken of staff trying to do the best for young people but assessments quickly began to feel rushed. A number of young people have reported that they felt Gids staff listened to them and have spoken positively of their treatment there.

But Dr Anna Hutchinson, a senior clinical psychologist at Gids, said the service was soon “accepting everyone”. She said puberty blockers were supposed to be prescribed to children to give them “time to think” about whether they wanted to transition fully, but she realised that almost all went on to take cross-sex hormones, such as testosterone and oestrogen, which have irreversible consequences.

Hutchinson told Barnes this was a “holy f***” moment. “It totally exploded the idea that when we were offering the puberty blockers, we were actually offering time to think,” she said.

“Because what are the chances of 100 per cent of people, offered time to think, thinking the same thing? If the service was getting this wrong, it was getting it wrong with some of the most vulnerable children and young people.”

She now believes that “some of those kids would not have identified as trans had they not been put on the medical pathway”.

“Of course, that doesn’t mean to say that identifying as trans is a bad outcome,” she said. “But what is a bad outcome is creating a cohort of people who are medically dependent who’d never needed to be. And not only medically dependent, but perhaps — we don’t yet know — medically damaged.”

She describes the service as “scandalous in its negligence and scale”.

In 2011, Gids began an “early intervention” study in which 44 patients aged 12 to 15 took part to see the longer-term effects of puberty blockers. But in April 2014 the practice of prescribing blockers to under-16s was introduced across the service before the data on their effects was available. A lower age limit of 12 was removed as Gids relied on a “stage, not age” approach based on where a child was in their development.

There are concerns about whether puberty blockers “temporarily or permanently” disrupt the development of children’s brains, as well as potentially stunting growth and affecting bone strength. Little is known about the long-term side effects.

Anastassis Spiliadis, a family therapist, told Barnes of the impact of outside groups, and parents, on decisions to refer often vulnerable children for puberty blockers.

He said in his four years at the service, on two occasions he decided that children from complex family set-ups and backgrounds should not be placed on blockers. However, the families complained and “both ended up on the blocker”.

Parents who complained were referred to “clinicians who we all knew it was much easier to get on hormones through them, rather than other clinicians”, he said.

There were also concerns that parents were pushing children into transitioning, in cases of fabricated or induced illness (FII), previously known as Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy.

In one case, he said, the child told him, “my mum wants this for me”, or “my mum wants the blocker more than I do”. He said there was sexual abuse and domestic violence in the family and he and a colleague agreed that they would not be putting the young person forward for puberty blockers. However, this decision was allegedly overruled by Carmichael.

On other occasions a change in clinician would be requested by Green, the Mermaids chief, Spiliadis said.

“I remember thinking and talking to Paul [Jenkins, the Tavistock chief] and saying that this is really inappropriate — how come a person who’s the director, or the CEO of a charity, is entitled to request a change of clinicians on behalf of a family?”

On his time at Gids, Spiliadis added: “We’re like, ‘Oh my God, will we look back in ten, 20 years and be like, what did we do?’”

Matt Bristow, a former Gids clinician, added: “Despite the obvious complexity of all these cases — sexual abuse, trauma, potential FII — the answer was always the same. That the young people eventually get put on the blocker unless they themselves say they don’t want it.”

Whistleblowers also allege the clinic, which treated under-18s suffering from gender dysphoria, was “institutionally homophobic” and bowed to pressure from parents who preferred their children to be transgender rather than gay. When homosexual clinicians raised concerns it was becoming a “conversion therapy for gay kids”, they were ignored because they were deemed subjective, it is claimed.

Barnes’s book refers to the financial benefits the Gids service brought to the Tavistock trust at a time when NHS services were under immense financial pressure.

Dr David Bell, a psychiatrist and former staff governor at the trust who wrote a critical report on the service in 2019 after being approached by a number of concerned employees, said the Gids national contract with the NHS — where it did not have to compete with another service — was “gold dust”.

“Bell argued that knowledge of Gids’s economic importance had made it difficult for those with legitimate criticisms to raise them,” Barnes writes.

Spiliadis added that, after not even having an office when he arrived, Gids “eventually took over a whole floor”. “But because it was bringing in so much money they [senior trust staff] could not challenge it,” he added.

Hutchinson said that with high pay, trips to transgender conferences in Europe and as far afield as Buenos Aires, the culture of Gids “more closely resembled a tech start-up than the NHS”.

As well as criticisms, a 2019 review by the medical director, Dinesh Sinha, following Bell’s report also heard positive testimony from staff members, who said they did not see any problems with Gids’ safeguarding practices.

But Sinha did not raise concerns passed to him during the course of his review with Appleby, the safeguarding head. When she finally saw the transcripts she said it was not only a “tragedy for the patients involved” but a “tragedy for the organisation — that so many of these narratives had been muzzled, and the people who had raised these concerns were demonised”.

Bristow said Sinha’s report was a “whitewash”.

The Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust said: “Gids works on a case-by-case basis with every young person and their family, working thoughtfully and holistically with them to explore their situation, with no expectation of what the right outcome for them might be. Only the minority of young people seen in the service are referred for any physical interventions. At the Tavistock and Portman we wholeheartedly support our staff to raise concerns, and have recently strengthened our mechanisms for doing so. Concerns relating to young people’s wellbeing are taken seriously and investigated.”

The Tavistock said it had records of only one patient being referred for medical intervention after one assessment and this person had gone through a detailed assessment at another gender service.

Mermaids declined to comment.

 

[Occam's Banana]

I Thought I Was Saving Trans Kids. Now I’m Blowing the Whistle.
There are more than 100 pediatric gender clinics across the U.S. I worked at one. What’s happening to children is morally and medically appalling.
https://www.thefp.com/p/i-thought-i-was-saving-trans-kids
Jamie Reed (09 February 2023)

[...]

Tavistock scandal ‘on a par with East German doping of athletes’
New book on NHS child gender clinic reveals how staff ‘regret’ routinely referring under-16s for puberty blockers
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/...-puberty-blockers-nhs-investigation-ghrqxk8pn
[archive link: https://archive.is/84iWT]
Glen Keogh (11 February 2023)

[...]

https://twitter.com/ShellenbergerMD/status/1624528963879206917

[additional matter hidden to save space]

 

 

[Anti Federalist]

Strange...this story seems to have just fallen away.



'Queeer’ Whistleblower Exposes Evils Of The School-To-Scalpel Pipeline

https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/1...oses-evils-of-the-school-to-scalpel-pipeline/

BY: IAN PRIOR FEBRUARY 15, 2023

Last week, a whistleblower came forward in The Free Press to expose how the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital engages in experimental interventions (aka “gender-affirming care”) on children that are “permanently harming the vulnerable patients in [their] care.”

The stories Jamie Reed outlines are horrific. Young girls were given testosterone, with gruesome side effects. Mentally ill individuals were chemically castrated with virtually no attempt to find another alternative. Parents were kept out of the loop, and people permanently altered their bodies as children, only to regret the decision shortly after. For the majority of these individuals, it is already too late.

Many of us have heard these stories before and have been desperately trying to get people to pay attention. Calling out the transgender agenda for what it truly is, an experiment on our nation’s children, of course, comes with backlash from trigger-happy leftists who deem this language “hateful,” “transphobic,” or “anti-LGBT.” For conservatives, that reality is something we have learned to live with.

The risk for the whistleblower was far greater. Reed describes herself as “a ***** woman, and politically to the left of Bernie Sanders” and is “married to a transman.” Her social and political circles are undoubtedly populated by people of similar viewpoints who are likely very supportive of so-called “gender-affirming care.”

This background is important — to come out as she did and to expose the horrors she witnessed at the St. Louis Children’s Hospital will almost certainly earn her a scarlet letter from her social and professional circle. She will likely face the realities of unemployment and social humiliation for standing up for the truth. She already knows the risks yet also knew that standing up on this issue was far more important.

Not only is this incredibly courageous, but it should be a message to others on the left who listen to the antics of glory seekers like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and her ilk, who have blamed the pushback for these practices on the “radical right.”

The whistleblower’s story is gut-wrenching in and of itself, but it reveals the endgame of drugs and surgery to chemically castrate and irreversibly damage children physically and mentally. That endgame does not happen in isolation.

It begins at school.

Schools Indoctrinate Early
In the early years of children’s K-12 education, they get to read books like “It Feels So Good to Be Yourself,” an illustrated book for ages 4-8 that encourages kids to question their sex at any age. One example in the book is Ruthie, a biological boy who tells his parents that the doctors got it wrong, and he is now a girl. Ruthie is 5 years old.

As children get older and enter puberty, the books encouraging this only grow more plentiful. Students will often see titles such as “Beyond Magenta: Transgender and Nonbinary Teens Speak Out” prominently displayed in their school libraries.

Meanwhile, school policies are changed to allow students to use the bathrooms and locker rooms of the sex with which they “identify,” to compete in sex-segregated athletic events pursuant to the sex with which they “identify,” and to be referred to by the “pronouns” they desire, regardless of whether other students and teachers have religious or moral objections.

Students who “identify” as a different sex are effectively given rights above and beyond everyone else. It’s no wonder young adolescents would deal with their growing pains in a way that gives them a feeling of acceptance, validation, and being part of a new “civil right.” In other words, a social contagion takes root.

Children are especially vulnerable to this phenomenon. When this was highlighted in Abigail Shrier’s book “Irreversible Damage,” the transgender lobby went on the attack, and her book was pulled from the shelves of Target. Those who dare suggest a social contagion is at play will be met with articles from corporate media citing so-called “experts” denying its existence. But now even a far-left whistleblower tells us of “clusters of girls” arriving at the clinic “from the same high school,” and says that “the doctors privately recognized these false self-diagnoses as a manifestation of social contagion.”

As this is all going on, schools work overtime to keep parents in the dark. Don’t like books encouraging transgenderism? Too bad, the book stays on the shelf and you had better hope you like being branded a “book banner.”

Even worse, schools require that staff not share with a student’s parents that their child is identifying as a different sex while at school. The reason? They consider transgender interventions to be health care, as articulated by President Joe Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services. Therefore, if you are not providing such health care to your child, you are a child abuser. They often won’t say this out loud or call Child Protective Services on you, but make no mistake — it’s coming.

Resisting the Profit Seekers
None of this is to say there aren’t actual cases of gender dysphoria that occur when a person feels a persistent incongruence or disconnect between their biological sex and the one with which they identify. These cases are extremely rare (in .06 percent of the population), and approximately 75 percent of children with gender dysphoria will age out of this condition.

Further, and as noted first by Shrier and then by the whistleblower herself, prior to the 2010s the vast majority of cases involved boys, but beginning in 2015, “teenage girls, many with no previous history of gender distress, suddenly declared they were transgender and demanded immediate treatment with testosterone.”

Dealing with the rare cases of gender dysphoria is not what is happening, however. Rather, the powers that be have set up academia to become a pipeline for a dangerous ideology that is gruesomely taking advantage of children and their parents. That ideology denies biology to provide customers for a rapidly expanding market that has experienced exponential monetary growth and is on pace to grow 11.23 percent over the next 10 years to become a $5 billion industry.

If you speak out, you will face repercussions. The activists in the space do not play by the rules, and they will seek to cancel and destroy you for daring to question the mutilation of children. But if we have learned anything from the St. Louis Children’s Hospital whistleblower, it is that people must stand up to stop this unethical, dangerous, and anti-science war of physical destruction being waged on children, regardless of politics.

 

[Anti Federalist]

This is where "We the People" have dropped the ball.

Justice will not be found in their courts yet collectively we keep trying.

With this, I have no problem with a short rope or high helicopter.

 

[Occam's Banana]

Trans Clinic Whistleblower Speaks Out
Jamie Reed is a life-long progressive and healthcare professional. For many years she has provided counselling to vulnerable populations including children in foster care, sexual minorities and young people with HIV. For four years she worked at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital, Missouri. What she saw in that time caused her to resign and turn whistleblower.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbuGMbqjsSw

 

[jmdrake]

PDF file: Affidavit of Jamie Reed

Missouri Attorney General Confirms Launch of Multi-Agency Investigation into St. Louis Transgender Center
https://ago.mo.gov/home/news/2023/0...ender-center-for-harming-hundreds-of-children
Missouri Attorney General (09 February 2023)

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. – Now that the whistleblower has gone public with her allegations about the Pediatric Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey confirms that two weeks ago the Attorney General’s Office began a full investigation into these shocking allegations. The Office has already received a sworn affidavit from the whistleblower and documents that support her allegations. The Missouri Department of Social Services and Division of Professional Registration are assisting the investigation.

“As Attorney General, I want Missouri to be the safest state in the nation for children,” said Attorney General Andrew Bailey. “We have received disturbing allegations that individuals at the Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital have been harming hundreds of children each year, including by using experimental drugs on them. 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.”

“The Division of Professional Registration and its 41 licensing boards license over 525,000 Missourians in more than 300 professions. Importantly, the Division and its boards’ mission is the protection of the public, especially those most vulnerable,” said Sheila Solon, Director, Division of Professional Registration. “The Division’s licensing boards will investigate the complaints they receive as part of this investigation, and take any necessary action against the licenses of Missouri professionals in violation of the boards’ statutory and regulatory authority to ensure health, safety and welfare of the citizens of Missouri.”

"The Department of Social Services takes its role to investigate concerns of potential fraud, waste, or abuse in Missouri's Medicaid program seriously,” said Robert Knodell, Acting Director, Department of Social Services. “We will investigate concerns raised in order to ensure the health and safety of our Medicaid participants and to protect the integrity of the Medicaid program."

So that parents are fully aware of the nature of these allegations, the Attorney General’s Office is releasing the whistleblower’s full, sworn affidavit. The sworn affidavit asserts, among other things, that individuals at the Center are using experimental drugs on children, distributing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones without individualized assessment, and even giving children these life-altering drugs without parental consent. The whistleblower says that the actions taken by the Center have led children to attempt suicide and that the Center never discontinues prescribing cross-sex hormones, no matter how much those drugs are harming the child. The whistleblower also has provided documentary evidence that the Center has been unlawfully billing state taxpayers to fund these actions.

Specific allegations include:

• “On several occasions, the doctors have continued prescribing medical transition even when a parent stated that they were revoking consent.”
• “The Center does not require children to continue with mental health care after they prescribe cross-sex hormones or puberty blockers and even continues those medications when the patients directly report worsening mental health after initiating those medications “
• “I have seen puberty blockers worsen the mental health outcomes of children. Children who have not contemplated suicide before being put on puberty blockers have attempted suicide after.”
• “It is my belief that the Center does not track these outcomes because they do not want to have to report them to new patients and because they do not want to discontinue cross-sex hormone prescriptions. The Center never discontinues cross-sex hormones, no matter the outcome.”
• “During my time at the Center, I personally witnessed Center healthcare providers lie to the public and to parents of patients about the treatment, or lack of treatment, and the effects of treatment provided to children at the Center.”
• “Doctors at the Center also have publicly claimed that they do not do any gender transition surgeries on minors. … This was a lie. The Center regularly refers minors for gender transition surgery. The Center routinely gives out the names and contact information of surgeons to those under the age of 18. At least one gender transition surgery was performed by Dr. Allison Snyder-Warwick at St. Louis Children’s Hospital in the last few years.”
• “The Center tells the public and parents of patients that the point of puberty blockers is to give children time to figure out their gender identity. But the Center does not use puberty blockers for this purpose. Instead, the Center uses puberty blockers just until children are old enough to be put on cross-sex hormones. Doctors at the Center always prescribe cross-sex hormones for children who have been taking puberty blockers.”
• “The Center tells the public and parents that it makes individualized decisions. That is not true. Doctors at the Center believe that every child who meets four basic criteria—age or puberty stage, therapist letter, parental consent, and a one-hour visit with a doctor—is a good candidate for irreversible medical intervention. When a child meets these four simple criteria, the doctors always decide to move forward with puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones. There were no objective medical test or criteria or individualized assessments.”
• “One doctor at the Center, Dr. Chris Lewis, is giving patients a drug called Bicalutamide. The drug has a legitimate use for treating pancreatic cancer, but it has a side effect of causing breasts to grow, and it can poison the liver. There are no clinical studies for using this drug for gender transitions, and there are no established standards of care for using this drug.”
• “I know of at least one patient at the Center who was advised by the renal department to stop taking Bicalutamide because the child was experiencing liver damage. The child’s parent reported this to the Center through the patient’s online self-reporting medical chart (MyChart). The parent said they were not the type to sue, but ‘this could be a huge PR problem for you.’”
• “Children come into the clinic using pronouns of inanimate objects like ‘mushroom,’ ‘rock,’ or ‘helicopter.’ Children come into the clinic saying they want hormones because they do not want to be gay. Children come in changing their identities on a day-to-day basis. Children come in under clear pressure by a parent to identify in a way inconsistent with the child’s actual identity. In all these cases, the doctors decide to issue puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones.”
• “In one case where a girl was placed on cross-sex hormones, I found out later that the girl desired cross-sex hormones only because she wanted to avoid becoming pregnant. There was no need for this girl to be prescribed cross-sex hormones. What she needed was basic sex education and maybe contraception. An adequate assessment before prescribing hormones would have revealed this fact. But because the doctors automatically prescribe cross-sex hormones or puberty blockers for children meeting the bare minimum criteria, this girl was unnecessarily placed on drugs that cause irreversible change to the body.”
• “On another occasion, a patient had their breasts removed. This surgery was performed at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. Three months later, the patient contacted the surgeon and asked for their breasts to be ‘put back on.’ Had a requisite and adequate assessment been performed before the procedure, the doctors could have prevented this patient from undergoing irreversible surgical change.”
• “It is my belief that the Center does not track these outcomes because they do not want to have to report them to new patients and because they do not want to discontinue cross-sex hormone prescriptions. The Center never discontinues cross-sex hormones, no matter the outcome.”
• “In just a two-year period from 2020 to 2022, the Center initiated medical transition for more than 600 children. About 74% of these children were assigned female at birth. These procedures were paid for mostly by private insurance, but during this time, it is my understanding that the Center also billed the cost for these procedures to state and federal publicly funded insurance programs.”
• “I have personally witnessed staff say they were uncomfortable with how the Center has told them they have to code bills sent to publicly funded insurance programs. I have witnessed staff directly ask the providers for clarification on billing questions and have providers dismiss the concerns and work to have the patients have this care covered as the priority.”

And yet we keep being told if we don't give the kiddos puberty blockers they are going to kill themselves.

 

[Occam's Banana]

Related, from the UK:

Tavistock scandal ‘on a par with East German doping of athletes’
New book on NHS child gender clinic reveals how staff ‘regret’ routinely referring under-16s for puberty blockers
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/...-puberty-blockers-nhs-investigation-ghrqxk8pn
[archive link: https://archive.is/84iWT]
Glen Keogh (11 February 2023)

[...]

https://twitter.com/wesyang/status/1655424388647329798

Much more dangerous than the street thugs:

https://twitter.com/i/status/1655565228271190016

 

[Occam's Banana]

Related, from the UK:

Tavistock scandal ‘on a par with East German doping of athletes’
New book on NHS child gender clinic reveals how staff ‘regret’ routinely referring under-16s for puberty blockers
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/...-puberty-blockers-nhs-investigation-ghrqxk8pn
[archive link: https://archive.is/84iWT]
Glen Keogh (11 February 2023)

[...]

The cult of gender ideology is finally disintegrating
Recent findings reveal that Susie Green had influence over policy at the Tavistock clinic – a woman who should never have had any authority
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/columnists/2023/05/30/the-cult-of-gender-ideology-finally-crumbling/
Suzanne Moore (30 May 2023)

Susie Green, the former chief executive of Mermaids, who stood down “unexpectedly” last year, has been hiding in plain sight for so long that I sincerely hope we can see her clearly now. How this woman was ever allowed to have so much influence over vulnerable children, never mind medical professionals, is frankly disturbing. She is a former IT consultant with no medical training – unless you count the fact that she won 2016’s Sparkle Diversity Champion of the Year as a specialised qualification. I certainly don’t. The story of how much power she came to have remains shocking.

The organisation she ran was once not controversial; it was a support group for children and parents of kids with gender issues until she got her hands on it. It became an activist and lobby group receiving hundreds of thousands of pounds in lottery funding and grants and was hired by the Department for Education to provide training on “gender identity” in schools. As with Stonewall, it had huge reach into key institutions and the usual gormless celebrity support.

We now find that Green herself had direct influence on policy at the gender identity development service (GIDS) at the Tavistock. After being told that the Tavistock did not have any records of meeting with Green, when threatened by court action, miraculously it found 300 pages of them.

They reveal that Green spoke directly to the director Dr Polly Carmichael, had advisory roles on two studies and – most scandalous of all – could refer children for treatment at the clinic even when their own GPs had repeatedly advised against it. The Cass Review, remember, effectively shut down GIDS as it was not fit for purpose.

GIDS was in turmoil and dealing with a new cohort of distressed young women with gender dysphoria; the number of girls jumped 5,000 per cent in a seven-year period. Cass found there were no long-term follow-ups even though nearly every child who was referred for prescribed puberty blockers went on to cross-sex hormones [which are used to transition from biological gender to desired gender].

Puberty blockers are controversial because we don’t have enough longitudinal studies to really understand their impact, which is why several countries such as Sweden and Norway have stopped them. The NHS site says they are not simply reversible. Research is showing that when distressed teenagers are given therapy, they no longer want to change gender and many accept they are gay. Puberty blockers tend to be the first step on a medical pathway that leads to cross-sex hormones and surgery. The other issue which Green should know well, is that if given too early, genitalia do not develop enough to make satisfactory “new models”. These kids may well lose their fertility and any chance of sexual pleasure.

There is an infamous Ted Talk and other YouTube videos of Green talking of what happened to her own son. He wanted a Barbie Rapunzel and other girl things. Her husband, she claims, didn’t like this “girly” boy. Later, he was whizzed off to the States at age 12 for puberty blockers and at 14 was out on oestrogen. He spent seven hours on his 16th birthday on an operating table in Thailand in what is euphemistically called “gender-affirming” surgery.

Green explains this meant “basically use[ing] the skin from the penis to create a vagina. And she hadn’t developed through full puberty so, not to put too fine a point on it, there wasn’t much to work with”. That is the work of puberty blockers.

This operation was done in Thailand as it is illegal to do that to a 16-year-old here. Indeed, it is now illegal in Thailand. If this well-known information is not a red flag, I don’t know what is. Yet this woman was, we now know, given carte blanche to overrule psychiatrists and medics and to push her dubious agenda. What is that agenda? It is the lucrative invention of the trans child. I say lucrative, because in the States, billions of dollars are projected to be made by surgeons and drug companies with lifelong medicalisation being offered to 13-year-olds who have been diagnosed sometimes as young as four.

Green herself has now chummed up with Dr Helen Webberley of GenderGP, who was once suspended, and who sells cross-sex hormones to under-16s, which is not allowed in the UK. This is done online with no counselling.

None of this is really about the trans rights of adults. It is about the pushing of extreme gender ideology on to distressed children. Any basic model of safeguarding has gone out of the window. It is a complete negation of the duty to ‘Do No Harm’ and at its centre is a woman who should never, ever have been given any authority.

I really hope that for Susie Green, the game is finally up.

 

[Occam's Banana]

See this post below for (1) a link to the affidavit of Jamie Reed (the author of the following article at The Free Press), and (2) the Missouri Attorney General's press release announcing its investigation of the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital.

[...]

https://twitter.com/peterboghossian/status/1701838048278020189

The pullback from youth gender transition has begun
States are pressuring hospitals to stop prescribing puberty blockers
https://unherd.com/thepost/the-pushback-against-youth-gender-transition-has-begun/
{Eliza Mondegreen | 12 September 2023}

First comes the pushback, then the pullback.

Yesterday, the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital announced that doctors there will no longer prescribe puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones to children and adolescents. This decision follows months of controversy and comes in the wake of a new law that just went into effect in Missouri, which limits hormonal and surgical interventions for gender transition to patients over the age of 18.

Under a “grandfather clause” in the new law, the Transgender Center could have continued to prescribe puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to current patients. However, it decided to back away from these interventions altogether:

We are disheartened to have to take this step. However, Missouri’s newly enacted law regarding transgender care has created a new legal claim for patients who received these medications as minors. This legal claim creates unsustainable liability for health-care professionals and makes it untenable for us to continue to provide comprehensive transgender care for minor patients without subjecting the university and our providers to an unacceptable level of liability.

-- Washington University Transgender Center
​

The Center first came under intense scrutiny earlier this year, when former case manager Jamie Reed blew the whistle on what she had come to see as dangerous practices within the clinic. In an article for The Free Press, Reed reported that:

“During the four years I worked at the clinic as a case manager—I was responsible for patient intake and oversight—around a thousand distressed young people came through our doors. The majority of them received hormone prescriptions that can have life-altering consequences—including sterility.

I left the clinic in November of last year because I could no longer participate in what was happening there. 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.”

-- Jamie Reed
​

Reed catalogued “red flag” cases to keep track of “the kind of patients that kept my colleague and me up at night” and documented cases of youth with serious mental health struggles rushed onto life-altering drugs and even undergoing surgeries they soon regretted. The Transgender Center rejected Reed’s assessment and conducted their own internal investigation — an investigation in which they never bothered to speak to Reed — before declaring her allegations “unsubstantiated”.

But the case for youth gender transition has been unravelling this year, under pressure from state officials and legislators and increased scrutiny from the media. At the end of August, St. Louis Circuit Court Judge Steven Ohmer allowed Missouri’s ban on hormonal and surgical interventions for youth to go into effect, writing that the evidence for youth transition “raises more questions than answers”.

Hence the “unsustainable liability” Washington University cited in its decision to pull back from this area of healthcare. That’s because Missouri’s new law also extended the period of time former patients have to sue for damages to 15 years. Perhaps, when the Washington University investigated themselves, they found more merit to Reed’s allegations than they were willing to acknowledge publicly. They fear being made to pay for it.

Medical scandals tend to end quietly: the “chemical lobotomy” phased out the lobotomy-lobotomy. The Satanic Panic choked not on its own absurdities but in courtrooms and insurance offices. Public reckonings are few and far between. “Unsustainable liability” may be the beginning of the end for youth gender transition.