“NY Times Confirms Gender Clinic Whistleblower’s Claim Adolescents Were Rushed into ‘Affirming’ Care”

The Times had a long and somewhat balanced report in their August 23rd issue. If you have any interest in the issue of whether children should have "gender affirming care" aka hormone therapy, etc, then hit the link. We have only excerpted a few paragraphs.

Opened in 2017 inside a children’s hospital affiliated with Washington University in St. Louis, the prestigious clinic was welcomed by many families as a godsend. It was the only place for hundreds of miles where distressed adolescents could see a team of experts to help them transition to a different gender.

But as the number of these patients soared, the clinic became overwhelmed — and soon found itself at the center of a political storm. In February, Jamie Reed, a former case manager, went public with explosive allegations, claiming in a whistle-blower complaint that doctors at the clinic had hastily prescribed hormones with lasting effects to adolescents with pressing psychiatric problems.

Note that Jamie Reed is a woman who is very liberal and in fact married to a trans man. See below.

Some of Ms. Reed’s claims could not be confirmed, and at least one included factual inaccuracies. But others were corroborated, offering a rare glimpse into one of the 100 or so clinics in the United States that have been at the center of an intensifying fight over transgender rights.

The turmoil in St. Louis underscores one of the most challenging questions in gender care for young people today: How much psychological screening should adolescents receive before they begin gender treatments?

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But as demand rose, more patients arrived with complex mental health issues. The clinic’s staff often grappled with how best to help, documents show, bringing into sharp relief a tension in the field over whether some children’s gender distress is the root cause of their mental health problems, or possibly a transient consequence of them.

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When Ms. Reed, 43, began working at the clinic, she considered herself a fierce champion of the gender-affirming model. In her previous jobs — at Planned Parenthood, at an H.I.V. clinic and in the foster care system — she had also supported L.G.B.T.Q. young people. And her husband, a transgender man, had shown her how essential gender-affirming care could be.

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Her doubts about the affirming model arose in 2019, she said, after hearing from an upset patient who regretted their medical transition. She grew more concerned in 2020 as more new patients sought the clinic’s help, many with psychological problems exacerbated by the pandemic. She saw parallels with England’s youth gender clinic, known as the Tavistock, which was under investigation after employees complained about feeling pressure to approve children for puberty blockers as their wait-list swelled.

The St. Louis center relied heavily on outside therapists to vet patients, emails show. Doctors there prescribed hormones to patients who had identified as transgender for at least six months, had received a letter of support from a therapist and had parental consent.

Frustrated that the clinic had no system to keep track of patient outcomes, Ms. Reed and the clinic’s nurse, Karen Hamon, kept a private spreadsheet, which they called the “red flag list.” (Ms. Reed gave The Times a version of the spreadsheet without identifying information. Ms. Hamon and other clinic employees declined to comment for this article.)

The list eventually included 60 adolescents with complex psychiatric diagnoses, a shifting sense of gender or complicated family situations. One patient on testosterone stopped taking schizophrenia medication without consulting a doctor. Another patient had visual and olfactory hallucinations. Another had been in an inpatient psychiatric unit for five months.

Hit the link here or above for the full article.