Rogelio V. Solis/AP Photo
A child holds trans pride flags at a gathering on the steps of the Mississippi Capitol in Jackson to protest House Bill 1125, which bans gender-affirming care for trans children, February 15, 2023.
Former New York Times columnist Bari Weiss recently founded a publication called The Free Press, and several weeks ago it published an account from a woman named Jamie Reed. Reed, who worked as a case manager at a Washington University gender clinic in St. Louis, made inflammatory accusations (with more in a sworn affidavit) that numerous children at the clinic were being carelessly shoved into irreversible gender treatment en masse.
Reed’s article went viral on social media, and was cited by numerous conservatives and transphobes as conclusive proof that too many kids are getting transition care. A couple of prominent liberals joined in as well. Matthew Yglesias cited it as credible on Twitter and Substack. “The picture she paints of the clinic’s treatment of children is ghastly. The affidavit she signed is even worse,” wrote Jonathan Chait at New York magazine. (It’s of a piece with an ongoing trend in liberal and centrist publications of writing anxious articles raising questions about youth transition care.)
There is just one problem. Reed’s account is a pile of garbage.
Even when it was first published, any sensible person should have seen some obvious red flags. Reed was not involved either in treatment or management, and her lawyer founded an openly transphobic organization. As Evan Urquhart pointed out at Assigned Media, she made several wildly mistaken claims about the side effects of some gender treatments. In her affidavit, Reed claimed that children came into the clinic identifying as “mushroom,” “rock,” or “helicopter,” only to be quickly given puberty blockers or hormones. This is not only facially preposterous, but in the last case suspiciously lines up with a common right-wing transphobic “joke.”
Sure enough, subsequent reporting has demolished Reed’s story. A woman named Danielle Meert whose child worked with Reed told a local NBC affiliate: “Saying that kids walk in and get hormones right away has not been our experience. It was about nine months until we had a puberty blocker implanted.” Another trans boy treated at the clinic contradicted her assertion that hormones were prescribed after just a couple of meetings with a therapist: “That’s not possible at all because a therapist has to see a patient for six months consistently, before they can even start writing the letter [of recommendation].” The Missouri Independent also interviewed numerous patients, who reported “any treatments were only undertaken after long consultations with doctors and mental health professionals.” Finally, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch recently interviewed numerous parents whose children had gone to the clinic, who “reported a well-defined, step-by-step approach that could be halted at any time.”
Reed’s intention, which she admitted on the record, was to shut down the gender clinic entirely. Indeed, the outrage prompted the Missouri attorney general to demand that the university shut down the clinic pending several state investigations, though it refused and is doing one itself.
As our recent Left Anchor podcast with Michael Hobbes and Urquhart goes into in detail, the United States is currently in the grip of a full-blown transphobic moral panic. Dubious, unrepresentative, or entirely made-up anecdotes are trumpeted across right-wing media, prompting conservative legislatures to place strict limits on transition care for minors, or ban it entirely—or in the case of a bill that recently passed the Oklahoma House, ban transition care entirely even for adults. They are attempting to shove trans people back into the closet, if not prevent them from existing.
Many centrist and liberal journalists are doing the same thing, only in a passive-aggressive fashion. The repeated front-page investigations in The New York Times over the past year are, just like Reed’s article, based almost entirely on anecdotes—some of them from openly transphobic organizations that are not identified as such—rather than actual studies, which have overwhelmingly found that transition is quite rare, detransition relatively unlikely, the regret rate of gender affirmation surgery low, and treatment difficult and expensive to access.
There are always risks and trade-offs with any health treatment, transition care included. But hyper-focusing on unrepresentative or fake stories in the context of a frenzied political assault on trans people is gravely irresponsible journalism.
