A small Midwestern gender clinic gets consumed by a growing political fight when a whistleblower goes public. She had begun to see the treatments as harmful, and decided the political route was the only way to fix it.
Chapter 1: What triggered the whistleblower investigation?
Tonight, local and state investigations are underway at one of our region's premier hospital systems.
Washington University's transgender clinic at Children's Hospital is at the center of a whistleblower investigation. This woman claims children are being harmed. In this 23-page sworn affidavit, she outlines practices by doctors and medical professionals at the center that many are calling disturbing and, more seriously, calling acts of child abuse, including...
In early 2023, a woman named Jamie Reed made headlines when she filed an affidavit with the Missouri Attorney General's office. She had been a case manager at one of the only youth gender clinics in the state, the Washington University Transgender Center. And in her affidavit, she made a number of explosive claims about the care kids were getting there.
Two days later, a first-person account of her experience was published in the Free Press. And she gave them an interview where she laid out some of her claims.
At the very beginning, I immediately could see that there were a lot of gaps. So in medicine, most places will have standard operating procedures. They'll have policies.
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Chapter 2: Who is Jamie Reed and what are her claims?
Jamie described a clinic totally unprepared for the moment.
None of those existed.
She said when she started in 2018, the clinic had just opened and had no formal guidelines for how it should operate. Soon, it was facing the same increase in patients as so many other clinics. Often, she said, those patients had severe psychological issues. In her affidavit, Jamie wrote about kids struggling with schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, PTSD.
There is absolutely no way that these patients were in the right mental health. place to be able to make any long-term decisions about their health, let alone decisions about gender transitioning as a child. And then the next thing you know, we're giving that next patient hormones too.
It just kept feeling like... And rather than treat those underlying issues, Jamie wrote that doctors were just prescribing puberty blockers and hormones, and routinely doing so without the willing consent of their parents.
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Chapter 3: What were the clinic's operational issues?
The parents said, no, these doctors would push and push and push and push. And every single visit, it would be push some more. And they'd straight up tell us this. I feel like I have been bullied into saying yes. And somehow the doctors thought that that was a true good consent.
Jamie said that after the leadership of the hospital didn't address her concerns, she quit her job at the clinic. A few months later, she filed her affidavit with the state.
I just had to go to who is there. And I live in a state where the people who are in these offices are Republicans.
And I believe that they are going to do their job. And when they do their job correctly, what happens to the transgender center you used to work at? I do not believe it can continue to function as a center. I believe it's the only way to actually stop hurting more kids.
In going public with these claims, Jamie Reed became the first whistleblower from a pediatric gender center in the U.S. And it wasn't just that she had worked at the clinic.
She describes herself as more progressive than Bernie Sanders. Okay, so this is not a conservative that we're dealing with.
She self-identified as a progressive and as a queer woman. And she was married to a trans man. So for opponents of the care, she was an incredibly potent messenger.
She is way out in left field, and she still, the details of her account of what's going on in there are just really, really gruesome.
The response was immediate.
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Chapter 4: How did parents react to Jamie's allegations?
Within days of Jamie coming forward, Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri opened an investigation into the clinic.
We needed a counting of every child who was abused in this way.
Every child. And a few months after that, Senate Bill 49 bans health care providers from prescribing medication or surgeries.
Missouri lawmakers, who had struggled for the previous two years to get the support they needed to pass a ban, were finally able to push it through. And they did it in part by citing Jamie's allegations. Meanwhile, parents of patients disputed her claims.
We know the whistleblower. We believe that what she's saying is right-wing rhetoric.
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Chapter 5: What political actions followed Jamie's whistleblowing?
They said she'd become some kind of tool of the Republicans. And civil rights groups filed a lawsuit to try to stop the ban from going into effect. And by August, a hearing date was set to decide whether care could be provided while the lawsuit worked its way through the courts.
So what's going on with Jamie and her testifying?
So I think she doesn't testify until 1230, but... And Jamie would be testifying at the hearing in support of the ban on care in Missouri. This wasn't an interview in The Atlantic or a column in The Washington Post. It wasn't a disagreement at a medical conference. This was something totally different. And it was happening right as political opposition was reaching a new high.
It is this like historic thing for someone who was actually working inside a clinic in this state to be coming out against it.
It was clearly a turning point in the story.
You know, and I think a lot of people don't know what to make of it.
And so we went to Missouri. From The New York Times, I'm Austin Mitchell. This is The Protocol with Azeen Gureshi. Part 4. The Whistleblower.
I want to make sure everything is tied up and, you know, rock solid before we publish. And so this afternoon you were on calls on it. Yeah. What were you doing? So this afternoon I was checking in with sources.
The hearing in Missouri was scheduled for late August, about six months after Jamie had first gone public with her allegations. And in that time, Azeen had been reporting on the clinic where Jamie worked. Because while conservative lawmakers had been quick to seize on her allegations, and advocates had been quick to dispute them, her claims had never been fully reported out.
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Chapter 6: How did the clinic's practices impact patients?
I was just talking to parents this weekend who were like, the collateral damage she's caused by coming out with her allegations, like she just is, you know, unimaginable.
Overwhelmingly, the parents who agreed to talk with Azeen, many of them part of a parents' group associated with the clinic, said the clinic was a godsend, the only place for hundreds of miles where they could get their kids the care they needed. They said the gender care had often resolved mental health issues their kids were dealing with. Some talked about it as life-saving.
And they said they felt blindsided and betrayed by what Jamie had done. One parent whose daughter had been cited in the affidavit as an example of harm showed Azeen her correspondence with the clinic's doctors. The messages made clear that Jamie had misrepresented some of the details of the story, which made it sound more damning.
I also do wonder if some of the parents are going to be there tomorrow.
And adding to the parents' feelings of betrayal was what Jamie was about to do.
They're going to feel heartbroken.
And so while we had come to Missouri to see how this case would play out in a courtroom, we first wanted to go see Jamie on the eve of her testimony to ask her why she was taking this unprecedented step.
Hello.
Wait, there's a third dog? No, it's only two.
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Chapter 7: What evidence supports Jamie's claims?
Are you nervous for tomorrow?
I wasn't as nervous until I talked to my own attorneys a little bit ago and... He reminded me not to talk to anybody if they're in the hallway that is like protesters or mean people.
And I didn't even realize that might be a... I've definitely heard from parents, Jamie, who are like, you know, feel like their kids are collateral damage in your war path to take down gender-affirming care and... Missouri and America, frankly.
Those individuals are going to be the people that are going to hold on to this the longest.
What do you mean?
The belief that they made the right choice for their kids the longest. They have to. They... wrapped their kid into something, and they're going to be the ones that will never let this go. There will never be a period where they will not personally probably hate every single individual who's publicly stood in opposition to these interventions.
But also, like, what if their kids are happy and doing well?
Those interventions didn't exist before. 20 years ago, and their kid could have been happy and doing well if we gave them a different set of care. If their child had these exact same feelings in 1990, their child would not have had access to this. They would have had access to psychotherapy and potentially could have also ended up happy.
I guess for Austin, who has not met you before, like you five years ago would be shocked, right, to hear what you're saying now. You clearly thought you were doing the right thing.
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Chapter 8: What are the implications of Jamie's testimony?
Jamie told us that as she was becoming increasingly disillusioned with what she was seeing at the clinic, she began to do some research online. She learned other people were also questioning the care. Some of them were re-evaluating the evidence that had launched this treatment model. The Dutch protocol...
The Dutch did all of this basically for this one tiny cohort. How did that jump from there to here? And how the hell did GEMS open? How did they bring an experimental procedure from a foreign country into the United States to start in a United States pediatric center and not have to have clinical research? Like this is like clinical research ethics like 101, right?
And on some level, that's where it all went wrong.
But, Jamie, like, the clinicians who have been raising alarms about the rising numbers, the lack of assessment, all of that, still believe that there are kids who benefit from these treatments, and they believe that because they've seen it with their own eyes. And... Talking about Laura Edwards-Leeper, for example. Dr. Anderson.
Laura Edwards-Leeper does not say that she supports bans on gender-affirming care. Correct. And so that's kind of where you diverge.
Correct.
And where she – it's not fair to focus on her. There was that whole letter that – you know, all the medical providers in the U.S. who said we disagree about a lot of things. Yes.
But here's what we agree on. Yeah.
Here's what we agree on. We agree on these bans are bad because it's legislative interference in medical care. And I just I'm bringing it up because like we're on the
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