The youth gender clinic at St. Louis Childrens/Washington University in St. Louis And the whistleblower who came forward.

Today’s post comes from two different sources.

https://www.stlouischildrens.org/conditions-treatments/transgender-center

We covered the transgender clinic at Children’s Mercy here in Kansas City a couple of weeks ago.  Today we are highlighting the transgender clinic in St. Louis, partially due to the whistleblower who came forward in the article by  Free Press and Bari Weiss last week.

So starting off with the transgender clinic.  Highlighting a few things, much as we did with Children’s Mercy.   This clinic is a joint effort between the children hospital and Washington University.  WashU is a pricy private college.  They have this to say “Gender affirming care is the gold standard of pediatric gender care.” The gender clinic was founded in 2017, so it is about 5-6 years into practice.

Our services include: (feel free to click the links to see the specific details)

• Patient education to determine the best transitioning plan for each person. For some, adjustments in gender expression — preferred name and pronouns, makeup, hair, voice, clothing and/or behavior — are enough.

• Puberty blockers, which delay puberty and suppress the development or progression of unwanted and irreversible secondary sexual characteristics.

• Hormone therapy to help a person’s body match their gender identity.

• Menstrual Suppression through the use of contraceptive options to help alleviate some dysphoria symptoms.

• Referrals to our psychologists and therapists in the community for gender dysphoria, low self-esteem and other issues; and psychiatric evaluation and treatment for depression, anxiety, eating disorders, PTSD and other complex mental health conditions.

• Voice and speech therapy to achieve gender-consistent speech, including pitch, intonation and quality.

• Assistance navigating issues around gender identity in school systems

• Referrals to community resources and support groups that empower parents and guardians.

They claim to offer services to 18+ for surgery.  My question then is why is a children’s hospital doing this?  Age 18 is legally an adult.  Whyyyyyy would a pediatric hospital be doing that surgery?  They offer top and bottom surgery, breast implants, fat injections to create hips and buttocks.  Again, why is a pediatric hospital doing this?

The puberty blockers portion though?  There is no age limit on those.  Per their website:

At What Age Can You Start Taking Puberty Blockers?

Because every child is different, there isn’t a single best age to begin puberty blockers. 

In general, starting puberty blockers in early puberty leads to better outcomes and prevents the lifelong difficulties that can result from living with undesired sex characteristics. While they can stop puberty from progressing, however, blockers can’t reverse changes that have already happened.  They are encouraging EARLY use of puberty blockers before any puberty body changes can start to happen.  That would indicate they are starting kids young, prior to age 12.

IN light of all of this information on their website, a former employee came forward as a whistleblower when she quit working at the gender transition clinic.

I Thought I Was Saving Trans Kids. Now I’m Blowing the Whistle.

The whistleblower joined the transgender clinic 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.  Per this whistleblower “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.”

This next portion is heartbreaking.  But it 100% accurately demonstrates what has happened with the transgender movement.  I can testify to this as a clinician myself, watching this unfold over the past 2-4 years.  “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.”

“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. 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.

The only requirement to start “transitioning” is a letter from a therapist stating you are transgendered.  The clinic willfully provided a template for the letter to be written.  They even had a list of therapists that they knew would write the letter.  Bring that letter to the clinic and boom.  Hormones started.  In one visit.

The families and the children had no idea what they were getting into.  Some of the effects noted by the whistleblower were that families and the patient had zero understanding about what the hormone meds and puberty blockers did, or what the side effects could potentially be.  “7-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.”  Another parent revoked consent for their childs treatment:

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. (Yep, I will confirm this 100% from what I see in my office).

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.

While this was going on, we were already seeing “detransitioners” as early as 2019.  The doctors in the gender clinic told the intake staff “why waste our time on people who decide to not be patients here any longer”.  If you don’t continue with the transition journey, they just kick you to the curb.

“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.”

This is heartbreaking to read.  I am proud of Jamie Reed for standing up and telling the truth.