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Notes -
On February 9th, Bari Weiss published (in her capacity as publisher - not the author of the article) an article in The Free Press purporting to be an accounting of misdeeds from a whistleblower, Jamie Reed, who worked at a transgender healthcare clinic for teens. Jonathan Chait, on February 17th, cited this in his own article, as well as the Affadavit the whistleblower filed with the Missouri Attorney General.
The afffadavit should be sufficient to dismiss Reed as a troll or a crank. Choice quotes, paragraphs 15 & 59:
15. One patient came to the Center identifying as a “communist, attack helicopter, human, female, maybe non binary.” The child was in very poor mental health and early on reported that they had no idea their gender identity. Rather than treat the child for their serious mental health problems, the Center put the child on cross-sex hormones and ignored the child’s obvious mental health problems. The child subsequently reported that their mental health actually was worsening once they started the cross-sex hormones.
[...]
59. Children come into the clinic using pronouns of inanimate objects like “mushroom,” “rock,” or “helicopter.” Children come into the clinic saying they want hormones because they do not want to be gay. Children come in changing their identities on a day-to-day basis. Children come in under clear pressure by a parent to identify in a way inconsistent with the child’s actual identity. In all these cases, the doctors decide to issue puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones.
Many journalists as well as state officials took seriously the allegations that children Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter, in a breathtaking display of credulity. Calls for investigating Reed's allegations to Save The Children From The Evil Clinic have come.
Chait, for his part, engaged in several twitter spats regarding the article. Notably this exchange, in which he demands that trans activists pre-register whether it is bad, if true.
On Wednesday, the Missouri Independent published their own investigation wherein they spoke to parents of those who used the clinic's services. A few choices quotes:
“I feel like I could go line by line to her affidavit,” Jones said, “and debunk it all.”
[...]
Several of those interviewed by The Independent also recounted their experiences with Reed — both good and bad.
“There were parents of trans kids who also raised some red flags around Jamie. So I really wish the center had listened to trans people,” Jones said. “We said: ‘This is a person who isn’t safe for us.’”
[...]
Reed’s affidavit to Attorney General Andrew Bailey alleges the Transgender Center quickly gave children hormones. The center “gave children puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones after just two one-hour visits (one with a therapist and one with a doctor at the Center),” she wrote in the affidavit.
Parents and former patients told The Independent it took months and multiple appointments before their transgender children received a puberty blocker or hormone treatment.
[...]
Lisa is the mother of a trans child who asked that her last name be withheld. She waited longer than the Freels family for her pre-teen son to receive a puberty blocker.
Her son had his first appointment at the Transgender Center in August 2019 but was too young for a puberty blocker. He had to wait three years.
He has had 21 visits with a psychologist and nine visits with an endocrinologist since the summer of 2019.
Joey, who also asked that his last name be withheld, started taking testosterone days before his seventeenth birthday and after nearly a year of therapy.
[...]
Parents said they felt like they had the Transgender Center’s doctors’ full attention to ask questions and review possible side effects of treatments. When they left, they had multiple handouts — some provided to The Independent that had been emailed from Reed herself.
[...]
Divorced parents told The Independent the center contacted both parents prior to proceeding with treatment, including meeting via video chat for an out-of-state ex-husband.
“They made it very clear that until, until the other parent was in full agreement, they could not move forward if and when one of the parents wanted to move forward,” Lisa said.
The St.Louis Post Dispatch also published an investigation, wherein they spoke to 30 people, with similar results as the Missouri Independent.
Chait is now contorting himself about whether Bayesianism is good.
update: Jessie Signal gets detailed account from Jamie, including uploads of her notes. This includes a google doc, with last edit on Jan 5, that includes attack helicopter incident.
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Jesse Singal has been in touch with Reed: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/journalists-are-exhibiting-far-too
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I had a lengthy analogy about the catholic church's sex abuse scandals (the right in trans debate: are the people who say "WTF PEDO CATHOLIC CHILDRAPE EVIL!!!!! EVERY PRIEST A PEDO!!!", the left in trans debate: catholics who say everything is fine and the anti-catholics (the real pedos) are motivated by hating truth and beauty), but i forgout about it, then accidentally closed the tab. so, shorter:
Reed makes many claims of the form - nearly all children had serious mental health issues, the center often gave out hormones the same week. That 'nearly all' (80%? 90%?) was facially implausible in a way that 50% wasn't. If you interact with randomly-selected underage trans people, even in hyper-selected-for-weirdness internet communities - at least half just don't have, or claim to have, diagnosed mental health issues! The affidavit makes much stronger claims than the FP piece, jumping between broad claims about most patients and specific claims of misconduct in specific tail-of-distribution cases. And its claims are correspondingly more obviously flawed. Even without the local news accounts, she's clearly significantly exaggerating the problems. And the local news accounts confirm the expected - many patients wait a while for hormones, get multiple consultations, don't have diagnosed mental health issues, are told of side effects, etc.
But ... this doesn't, and can't dispute the specific claims of misconduct in the extreme cases. And if we assume Reed wasn't fabricating specific stories whole-cloth (so the specific examples they gave at least sort-of happened) - but just exaggerating particularly noteworthy experiences she had (as many do), it could still be bad. If 85% of trans kids are mentally healthy and get treatment on a reasonable and conservative schedule (in a relative sense), and 10% of trans kids declare they're trans because they want to be cool on tumblr and being trans is uwu, and some of the latter are 'mentally ill' ... is that really implausible? And it explains her writeup better than a "Stephen Glass-type fabrication" does, and is compatible with the local news investigations. (lol @ original article mentioning her keeping a document with all the bad cases, but not mentioning the number of bad cases in the document, or the ratio between that and all patients)
"Treegender" and co aren't fake, quite a few dumb kinds on tumblr and tiktok really do that. The "attack helicopter" thing was probably a joke, but maybe it was someone being dumb and making absurd claims, involving a common internet meme.
That all would contradict both the "leo sapir" types' desired claims (they like to imply that kids either shouldn't transition generally, or that at least half of current trans kids aren't really trans in some sense) and the "michael hobbes" types' desired claims (kids aren't really transitioning for stupid reasons, the entire issue is just a right-wing selection bias hatemachine).
So I don't think the debunking penetrates the right-wing motte, though it demolishes the bailey.
Not sure why OP got so few comments. Compare to a nearby right-wing debunking, which got 49 updoots and quite a few.
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Singal is on Twitter arguing it's entirely plausible that a Tumblr addled teen said something silly around a case worker. I agree that seems possible, but the bigger issue seems to be that they said that psychological services were rarely provided in and never in an ongoing manner while those parents say that their children had twenty appointments. It doesn't seem like Reed provided a good characterization of the services the clinic offered.
It would be nice to have good statistics on this stuff but medical privacy laws make it unlikely. I also would be nervous about building a database of trans teens when Texas and now possibly Florida are trying to make gender affirming care grounds for losing custody.
Do we have a good way of knowing about what happens inside medical clinics besides testimony from staff/patients?
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Well played. Goes to show always double check when someone's telling you exactly what you want to hear.
Doesn't do much to move my priors, though. Too many cases of underage mastectomies for me to buy that everything is fine in transgender care.
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So.. what was this ?
It looks like a dirty trick of the sort Karl Rove used - e.g. he knowingly leaked a forged memo the media would seize, and then revealed it was forged to discredit them.
Who fucked up their due dilligence here ? Or was the affidavit published after the article ?
Looking at urls, the affidavit seems to have been published earlier. Did the author of the article not read it?
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Who is Reed?
The whistleblower/affadavit filer. Post edited for clarity.
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