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Notes -
The attack helicopter line always seemed plausible to me because kids say some weird things. The weak part of Reed's account is that she had a tendency to frame what could be very real malpractice by the clinic in maximalist terms that make it easy to 'debunk' by finding single counterexamples
Reed claimed that it was a common tactic to say 'you can have a living daughter or a dead son' then later admitted only one clinician said that. Reed said that patients weren't warned about vaginal tissue atrophy but it's listed on the pamphlet the clinic gives out.
Reed's affidavit claims "nearly all" of the patients have severe mental illness and that the clinic "almost never" allowed her to prescribe psychological care. Then the Missouri Independent finds parents (the Freels not Hutton) who says their child has no mental health issues and pursued social transition and counseling for a year before starting medical transition. So are they the tiny exception to the "almost never" and the clinic has them on speed dial to cover for the rest, or are they typical and Reed is exaggerating the prevalence of a few outlier cases? We don't have statics here for medical privacy reasons.
To return to the salacious attack helicopter bit, originally #15 from the Affidavit says that a patient "came to the center identifying as a communist attack helicopter". Now Reed adds says that was a line from a letter recommending hormones from an outside therapist. The first account makes it seem like people were walking in identifying as attack helicopters and getting prescribed puberty blockers on their first visit when really they had been seeing an outside therapist previously who recommended the treatment. Reed said she didn't know this was a meme and was concerned about that it indicated a lack of clear gender identity. We don't have the letter, we just have that she wrote the attack helicopter line in her Notes app contemporaneously. It's possible the doctor was a hack, it's possible Reed misread a joke, but being overly credulous of the recommendations of outside therapists is pretty different from handing out estrogen to kids coming in identifying as attack helicopters.
American healthcare is individualized and it seems plausible to me that there are doctors out there giving puberty blockers and HRT to kids who don't need them, it's plausible some such doctors worked at this clinic. Reed also doesn't seem like an anti-trans ideologue, but she also wasn't careful about making precise well documented claims.
I'll concede the claims being imprecise, but regarding the documentation, as much as I'd love to see it, what exactly is the legality of raiding the clinic for patients' data?
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