This morning, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the United States v. Skrmetti. The legal challenge brought by the Biden administration, and supported by more than 160 Democratic lawmakers in their own brief to the court, concerns whether Tennessee’s ban on transgender drugs and surgeries for minors violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Tennessee is among 26 states that have similar bans in place, many of which are being challenged in the courts.
Last year, The Free Press published a groundbreaking account from Jamie Reed, the first public whistleblower from inside a gender clinic in the United States. And the response was explosive. You wouldn’t expect Reed to support these Republican-led bans: She is a lifelong progressive lesbian married to a trans man who has now detransitioned, and describes herself as “to the left of Bernie Sanders.” Yet she is also the executive director of the LGBT Courage Coalition, a movement of lesbians and gay men opposed to pediatric gender transitions.
Today she is speaking outside the Supreme Court about why she hopes the Tennessee law will be upheld. The following piece is adapted from her remarks. —The Editors
Today, just meters away from where I stand, the top legal minds in the country will consider whether there’s a constitutional right to harm children.
How did we get to this point? The medical practice of treating children who are distressed about their gender started out with good intentions. But this case, at its core, represents the profound failures that have occurred in our institutions. Failures that began when activism took over science. Failures that can only be corrected by the courageous, and now the courts. It should never have reached this point, but here we are.
These failures began with the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society. These medical organizations quite suddenly embraced the idea that any child who expressed gender distress must immediately be affirmed and swiftly medicalized.
This then spiraled as risk-management departments and ethics boards at major hospitals grew fearful of raising questions about why there was an explosion of children and teens who wanted this treatment. Not only were these treatments moneymakers for hospitals—it quickly became career-threatening to raise any concerns about this new branch of medicine and the dangers of subjecting young people to lifetime treatments with unknown consequences.
I was once on the front lines, among the proselytizers. Between 2018 and 2022, as a case manager at the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, I worked with gender-dysphoric youth, and I initially thought we were helping patients. I believed our practices were evidence-based. I trusted we were operating under guidelines created from the scientific method. I assumed that the studies that touted these practices were rigorous and conducted within medical research ethical guidelines. We trained the other hospital departments, the schools, and the staff in the local family courts on how to treat children we called trans: Affirm a new identity without regard for biology or the underlying causes of gender distress.
Yet when I pulled back the curtain, I was shocked to learn this “science” wasn’t worthy of the name.
At our gender clinic, patients often had glaring comorbidities like depression, anxiety, ADHD, and eating disorders, or were on the autism spectrum. Many were young people who, if left alone, would most likely grow up to be gay men and lesbians, like myself. Yet we sold our patients the idea that if they are at all different, or gender nonconforming, they must be trans.
I saw teenage girls, with no history of dysphoria, being approved after just one meeting with a therapist. My colleagues could see social contagion as a potential factor in other conditions like Tourette syndrome, tic disorders, and “multiple personalities.” But with gender dysphoria, even suggesting there was a social aspect at work risked accusations of “transphobia.”
I saw teenagers lose their sexual function before they could understand what this would mean for them. A 17-year-old female ended up in the emergency room thanks to a hormone prescription from the clinic. The testosterone she was taking had thinned her vaginal tissues, and her vaginal canal had ripped open after intercourse, requiring surgery.
I saw regret in my patients a few months after it was too late. An 18-year-old girl who had a double mastectomy, only to decide to accept her female identity, begged us, “I want my breasts back.”
I was so disturbed that, in 2022, I quit my job after four years and shared what I had seen with Missouri attorney general Andrew Bailey. My testimony sparked an investigation, leading the state to conclude that “there is every reason to believe these problems affect more than just the largest transgender center in Missouri.” That is correct. The first pediatric gender clinic in the U.S. was opened in 2007. There are now at least 100 across the country, a number believed to be a low estimate.
When I first made the critical decision to become a whistleblower, I went back to the basics of science. I asked myself: Are these interventions helping children? Do the risks outweigh the benefits? Are these children getting better?
The answer was simple, if painful: No.
Inside the court today, the justices will hear lawyers argue that the evidence for gender transition is robust and that the treatments are lifesaving. This is false. The studies used to justify child transition are weak and debunked. Many rely on small, selective samples, use biased assumptions, and often are undertaken by activist clinicians who have conflicts of interest regarding the outcome. In England, a rigorous and independent report, The Cass Review, concluded that the evidence for pediatric transition is “remarkably weak.” That’s why Finland, Norway, Sweden, and other nations have joined the UK in moving away from so-called gender affirmation.
That’s why I am here in favor of legislation that protects vulnerable young people from being misled by a medical system that has lost its bearings. I am in favor of protecting children who don’t have the capacity to understand the irreversible consequences—including possibly sterility—of these treatments.
The Supreme Court will consider whether we have the right to govern ourselves in a way that protects children and grounds them in reality. My hope is that when the justices hear all the evidence, they will make a decision that honors science and the truth.
Jamie Reed is a pediatric gender care whistleblower and the executive director of the LGBT Courage Coalition. Follow her on X @JamieWhistle and read her piece, “I Thought I Was Saving Trans Kids. Now I’m Blowing the Whistle.”
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