Trans Clinic Whistleblower Speaks Out - Jamie Reed
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 6 minutes
Words per minute
149.78136
Harmful content
Misogyny
20
sentences flagged
Toxicity
18
sentences flagged
Hate speech
20
sentences flagged
Summary
In this episode, we speak with Dr. Jamie Reid, a former pediatric transgender clinic caseworker, about her experience at a transgender clinic in the United States. She shares her story of how she became a whistleblower, and why she decided to speak out.
Transcript
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Mental health was getting worse once they started the blocker.
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And that's against what the narrative tells us. The narrative says these interventions are
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supposed to make people better. We were pretty much putting anybody on testosterone at 13 and
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a half if that's what they wanted. It was getting to the point where we were harming more patients
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that we were helping just by the numbers. What I am not in agreement with is this push
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to rapid medicalization of children. And it got to the point in the center where
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there was an actual directive that we were no longer allowed to use the phrase,
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I have concerns about a patient. And in medicine, that should scare anyone.
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Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster.
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And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
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Our very special guest today is a whistleblower from a transgender clinic in the United States.
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It's great to have you on the show. Listen, Francis and I have just both re-read your article for a
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second time. We're going to talk about all the stuff that you said. One of the most terrifying
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things that I've ever read, to be honest. And so I'm looking forward to speaking with you about it.
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But before we get into that, just tell our audience who may not be familiar with you and
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the story that you shared. Who are you? What's been your journey through life? How did you get to the
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position that you got to? And what did you see there? And why did you decide to speak up?
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Thank you for those questions. So I'm Jamie Reid. I have a master's of science in clinical research
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management. And I was previously the caseworker in the pediatric transgender center at a clinic in
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St. Louis, Missouri. So in the middle of the middle of America. I started, well, I spent about four years
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and four months in that position. I worked at the university previous to working with trans kids. I was
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working with young adults who were HIV positive. I have a lot of experience in case management.
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I worked with kids who are in foster care. And I've also worked in a lot of medical and health settings
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too. So I came into the clinic really excited about the opportunity that I thought was going to be to
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help trans youth and their parents. And you mentioned in your article that, you know,
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you're very progressive, you're married to a trans man, like, or in a relationship with
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a trans man. Sorry, I don't remember which, but in any case, you're married. Well, congratulations.
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So very progressive, you know, you come into this place wanting to make a difference, I assume.
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And then over a period of time, you start to have doubts, and you try to express doubts,
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and that doesn't go particularly well for you. And increasingly, you become very alarmed
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at what you're seeing. So talk to us, you know, just at the very beginning of that,
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Germany, you get there, you're all pumped and ready to go. And what happens?
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Right away, I was struck by the lack of organization for the center. So there was no real written
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protocols. It seemed like it was kind of a fly by the seat of the pants kind of operation. They had
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already been open for a solid year before I got there. And yet, it seemed like they were kind of
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operating outside of a lot of the normal structures that you'd see in medicine. Most of the departments
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and divisions in medicine have a lot of layers, there's a lot of top heavy, there's a lot of,
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you know, administrative roles. And it seemed like the center was kind of
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off on its own, had this little pocket. And I was also struck at the very beginning because the
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administration of this hospital let this clinic open. And I was told that they originally thought
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that they were going to have about 50 patients total. And when I left, we were close to 2000.
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Wow. Yeah, huge difference. Wow. And why do you think that was, Jamie? What do you think were the
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reasons for that? I definitely have come to believe that in the United States, there is an element of
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social contagion in play going on with young people who are seeking out care in gender centers. And I'm not
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the only one to believe that. I had lots of parents report very similar things. And there were even a
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number of patients in the center who would report and directly said, I only got this online.
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Wow. So they only got this online because your article is very interesting because
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you talk about when you started in the center, it was mainly boys suffering from gender dysphoria.
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And then you started to see more and more girls come in. Were they the ones who were particularly
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susceptible to this social contagion, as you put it?
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I think it's well known in medicine that adolescent girls are just more
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open and more susceptible to many different kinds of social contagions.
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That has to do with a lot of ways that girls are socialized, but also the way that girls interact
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in kind of group settings and pick up things and show empathy with those in their group setting,
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oftentimes by taking on attributes in those group settings. So I didn't just see that these
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kids were picking up gender as a social contagion. We have a lot of issues right now in my country
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with adolescents who are experiencing tick disorders. They think they have Tourette's.
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There's been a recent wave of young people believing that they have what they refer to as DID,
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so multiple personalities. You are seeing these things directly coming from social media.
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And Jamie, can I ask you a question? And sorry to sort of appear picky, but before you started talking
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about how adolescent girls have certain problems, you kind of did like a little sigh, almost like you're
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resigning yourself to having to say. Was part of your experience that even that very idea was
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controversial in the environment that you were operating in?
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Yeah. So you'll have to remember that in some ways I am deprogramming my language out of some cult-like
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conversations. So even for me, I still take pause in using the phrase adolescent girls, because when you
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work in a place like this, you don't say that. You say people are assigned female at birth.
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You don't say people are boys. You say they are assigned male at birth. So even the way that we
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spoke about everybody was in this framework of the gender ideology world.
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Wow. So I know that to you, this seems kind of like normal, but to a person outside of that space,
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just to clarify, in this transgender clinic, you would never refer to people as boys or girls or
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men or women. You would say assigned female at birth.
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But even though biological sex is obviously real.
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Oh, yes. Medicine is really interesting in this right now, because in some ways,
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all of the doctors would clearly acknowledge biological sex. You would say someone was assigned
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female at birth, assigned male at birth. Maybe you could use natal sex.
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And they acknowledged its existence because if you're in the emergency room and you have somebody
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who's coding and you're trying to figure out what their lung capacity is, there are definite medical
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needs and times when your biological sex changes the course of the treatment.
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But in our patient population, everyone was assigned female at birth, assigned male at birth.
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You heard the term cis a lot, who's cisgender. We talked about how all of our patients were probably,
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you know, would judge you if you walked in and they thought you were cis.
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And those kind of things. It's it's it's it's constant.
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And Jamie, how did this affect this type of language? How did this affect the way that you treated your patients?
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I do think that the staff were always sort of on edge because it wasn't just the concern that you were providing good medical care,
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but you also always had the concern. It has this patient's pronouns changed again.
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And their preferred names were changing frequently. Even the term preferred name.
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Sometimes people would say that's not that's, you know, activists would push that that you can't even say that because it's not it's it's not their preference.
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It's their name, even though it's not their legal name. A lot of the staff that are hired into the clinics like this,
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at least in the United States, are also activists and oftentimes directly there is a push to directly hire trans and LGBTQIA people to work in these clinics as the staff.
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And so you join the clinic, you start working, you start noticing some of these things.
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And when did you start to get really concerned? Because you were the person responsible for processing the intake of potential patients.
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So you're getting these people in and going, you go here, you go there.
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When did you feel like, whoa, like this is not good?
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There definitely was a point where I went from 10 intakes a month where there would be 10 newly referred young people to the numbers being in the 40s and 50s every single month.
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And the cases were getting more and more outlandish or sometimes even completely bizarre.
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In the states, oftentimes, if anything about gender gets brought up in a pediatrician's office, they immediately just refer you to the gender center.
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So I could be getting an intake where a kid maybe told their parent three days ago that they thought they were non-binary and asking for they, them pronouns.
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And yet they're already landing in a specialized medical clinic that does hormones.
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So there were some intakes where it was just, it made absolutely no sense.
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The entire concept of kids being allowed to explore their gender and explore these concepts have been almost wiped off the map.
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Let's say I bring my 12-year-old daughter to you.
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Three days ago, she said that she's non-binary.
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So initially, I would try to be encouraging you as a parent to find a therapist and start working with a therapist for your kid.
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Um, but the minute you're talking to me on the phone, you have already started on a pathway because the only therapists that I have to refer your kid to are therapists who are going to affirm their gender identity, not question it at all.
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And potentially, as soon as I say, take your kid to that therapist, that therapist might see them for one or two visits and send them right back to the center to get started and seen by the people that prescribe hormones.
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So three days ago, my daughter said, I think I'm non-binary because she saw on social media, let's say, I bring her to you, you send us to a therapist, therapist sees us a couple of times, sends us back to you in order to see a doctor to be prescribed hormones.
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So I think this is a very important part of the conversation because someone I know very close to me had a double mastectomy and that is a very, very serious operation.
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It's a very serious operation and you know this better than anyone.
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It can take months to recover from and actually the risk of complications with such an invasive type of surgery, the risks are high, to put it mildly.
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And what are the potential side effects of these drugs?
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So the puberty blockers we were using were mostly their implants that go into the arm or their injectables that are used on a monthly or three month basis.
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And in our center, you had to be at least in the very initial start of puberty to get a puberty blocker.
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But one of the things we were starting to see was that some of the kids put on the puberty blockers, mental health was getting worse once they started the blocker.
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And that's against what the narrative tells us.
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The narrative says these interventions are supposed to make people better.
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And what we were seeing was parents calling and saying, my child has had the blocker in for a month.
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They've had the blocker in for three months and they're now failing out of school.
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Things that were supposed to be getting better were getting worse.
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In the center that I worked in, I started there when we were still supposed to be operating under the WPATH guidelines, standard of care seven, which had some age kind of ideas for when people were supposed to start hormones.
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WPATH 7 was supposed to be 16 and it said only in rare and, you know, kind of urgent cases should you be under the age of 16.
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We were pretty much putting anybody on testosterone at 13 and a half if that's what they wanted and they got to us in time.
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And what does that do to you if you are a young person who's been given testosterone?
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Even if you were given a blocker first and we blocked you and then put you on a cross-sex hormone, we are potentially basically causing you to be infertile for life.
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And testosterone, you know, the effects that kids reported that they wanted happened pretty quick.
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So, we would permanently affect your voice and your voice would be dropped into a male pitch.
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You would see growth on your clitoris into what we would refer to as a micropenis.
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We would start seeing atrophy and your vaginal canal would start to have atrophic features.
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All of your body fat would start to move and shift around.
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A lot of our patients would start to start losing the hair on the top of their head.
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We would see patients who were, again, they were supposed to be getting better.
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Their mental health was supposed to be getting better.
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A lot of times it was not doing what we thought it was going to do.
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And if you were on feminizing hormones, you would start growing breast tissue.
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And again, if you were put on blockers first, it would render you potentially infertile for life.
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And now we also know for the kids, the boys, if we block you and put you on feminizing hormones,
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we also are potentially making you have sexual dysfunction for life.
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So in the boys, blockers make it so that they never grow the penis or the testicles.
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If you never go through puberty and you never have those hormones affect that area,
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you are left with the same kind of penis size that you would have that kids have when they're little before they go through puberty.
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And then also we knew that the feminizing hormones would make it so you had a lot of erectile dysfunction.
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The testicles would shrink and we would be causing changes to that part of the body that were irreversible.
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I hate to state the obvious, but those are some pretty major changes for a young person to undergo an experience.
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And the fact that a young person could have that start happening to them after seeing a therapist twice and an endocrinologist once,
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One of the other things that we should also talk about is it came to a point you talked about in your article that
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sometimes there were situations, particularly if it went to court, if parents disagreed about this,
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that you had a situation that you talk about where the mother, who was quite disturbed, based on your recollection at least,
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insisted that her daughter, who wasn't particularly a typical case of someone who was experiencing genuine desire to transition,
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was encouraged to transition by her mother against her father's wishes.
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And the center where you worked for was essentially the one that was giving the recommendation to the judge
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and made the recommendation that it should be the mother's opinion that essentially comes out on top.
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So a parent was in a situation where the child was going through all of this without even consenting to it.
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And right now in the United States, it seems like in the courts,
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the parents who want to give these drugs are the ones that are winning in the custody cases,
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which to me, it just oftentimes the parents who didn't want to give the drugs,
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all they were asking for was more time in therapy.
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And even I they were losing, they're losing in court.
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And I think in part because doctors like the doctors that worked in my center would show up in court
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and testify on behalf of the parent who wanted to give the drugs right away.
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Because it's the part of the ideological mindset that the thought is,
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is that we have to give these drugs right away or else or else these kids are going to be harmed somehow.
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So and you say ideological, is there not evidence to say that, you know, if you get in there early,
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you can say that's the argument that people make.
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You know, you get in there early, you save them the discomfort of later life developing,
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you know, the anatomy of their birth sex, et cetera.
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Um, not in the kinds of patients that are presenting currently.
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So if you look back at the original study, it's often referred to as the Dutch study.
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If you look back at the original study, they were screening out patients who had mental health concerns
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because the goal of that treatment was, yes, to treat some dysphoria.
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But there's not evidence that this treats major depressive disorder, borderline personality disorder, autism.
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That's that's not what this is evidence to treat.
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And yet the argument is, is that if we can medicalize somebody,
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then all of their other mental health issues will somehow be alleviated.
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And the reason you mentioned that, sorry, Francis, just to clarify this,
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is that a lot of the new cases that you saw over and above what you expected,
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They were young girls who were presenting with eating disorders, autism, autism-like symptoms, et cetera.
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And they are, and they are girls who oftentimes there is a disagreement.
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So they will claim that, oh, I felt like this my whole life.
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And their parents initially will often say they had no gender issues at all as a child,
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that they were absolutely normatively fine in their being a girl.
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What you were saying is completely antithetical to the creed that doctors are supposed to follow,
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What you're saying and what I'm hearing is harm being inflicted on children, which is appalling.
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Yes, that's what I came to finally understand, that maybe, maybe out of our huge number of patients,
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there were a few patients that this model of care maybe helped.
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But it was getting to the point where we were harming more patients that we were helping just by the numbers.
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And so why, at that point, when girls with autism, I think you quoted the number of 30% are presenting themselves.
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The 30% of autistic girls, when people with severe psychiatric illnesses are presenting themselves
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and have been putting through transition, including some of the awful cases that you've spoken about,
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why hasn't there been more people coming out and talking about this or more people wanting to stop this?
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So I do think those people, I think that there are more people like me.
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And I know that I've spoken to a number of them since I have come forward.
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But if you even look at what has happened to me in my own local press, those, basically the voice of reason,
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the voice of can we slow down, the voice of we need to actually look at who we're hurting,
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is being drowned out right now and we're being shouted down and screamed out by this idea
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that the fact that I say anything is somehow is going to hurt and harm trans kids.
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So what has been the treatment that you've received from the local press?
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I can't even count the number of articles and all they do is have vilified me.
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And they also vilify me in strange ways where I just wonder,
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a lot of America right now is liking to pretend like y'all in England don't exist
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or that Sweden doesn't exist or Finland doesn't exist or nor none of the countries like your country
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that's actually starting to have some kind of a dialogue around this.
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All the local media would like to think that America is in its own bubble
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and we know what's right on this topic and no one else exists.
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Well, the reason I ask is we've spoken to a lot of people about this issue from all sorts of different angles
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and the usual stuff is they're a transphobe, whatever.
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I also had identified as genderqueer in the past
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and I experienced a lot of gender dysphoria as a child myself.
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I do still think that adults who are transitioning would benefit by support of a therapist
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and a therapeutic process, but I am not in any way opposed to trans people.
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I fully understand that there is a lot of diversity in gender and gender presentation,
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but what I am not in agreement with is this push to rapid medicalization of children
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and also the current model doesn't even, it doesn't even make sense if you're actually pro-diversity
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because if, if I am pro-gender diversity, why are we telling little kids that if they play with a toy
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that is not in their gender category, that somehow that means that they're trans?
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Like I thought it's 2023, shouldn't we be telling our children you can wear whatever you want,
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you can play with whatever toys you want, you can have whatever job you want
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and instead we've, we're in some like weird 1950s thing where if a boy plays with a Barbie
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suddenly his parents think that he needs to go to a gender clinic and it means that they're trans?
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Do you know the thing that I find quite unusual as well is that in a society like America,
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which is so litigious, where people sue others at the drop of a hat,
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you have the minimum of medical checks, fast tracking not only people but children.
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Children, children and young, some very young children at that through to irreversible medical procedures.
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I mean, that's just, I mean, that's just a million dollar lawsuit waiting to happen, isn't it?
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No, because unfortunately the, the institutions that are supposed to,
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So if you go and try to file that lawsuit in the United States today,
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the doctors and the hospitals are able to say that the American Academy of Pediatrics says that this is right,
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the Endocrine Society says this is right, and they tried it,
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they can just claim that they're just following all of these medical guidelines.
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Um, I, I did not believe that where I worked was following even these quote guidelines,
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but judges, I think thus far have been taking that at that easy face value.
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I mean, you hear it in the news, well, the American, you know,
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all of the American medical establishments agree with this kind of care.
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And I suppose just to give people an example of what you're talking about,
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you talk in your article about a case where there was a girl who had a double mastectomy.
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I think it's 16, uh, if I'm remembering correctly, or around that time.
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No, I think if, if you're talking about the patient who called a few months later and asked
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to have her breast put back on, she was not a minor, but she was young.
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A few months later, she calls up and says, I'm a girl.
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I mean, a horrifying story in and of itself.
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So she's not going to be able to breastfeed her child.
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The most horrific thing, I think, well, one of the most horrific things that could happen
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to a young woman, you were saying she can't sue the people who advised her and put her
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There is potentially a case there, but I know that, um, the way that the surgeons and the
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way that the center responded was that she made the choice.
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And I think we see that with the detransitioners and some of them are minors and they will
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And that's kind of the question here, isn't it?
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Because one of the most mind boggling things about this ideology, as you describe it, is,
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Uh, I'm, I'm also not somewhere in the middle, but I thought one of the most central elements
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of progressivism was this increased attention towards the idea of consent.
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People shouldn't do things, uh, you know, to other people without their consent.
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But I don't know about anyone, but it doesn't seem to me like a 15 year old or a 16 year old,
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frankly, even an 18 year old from a very troubled background like this young woman is really capable
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of consenting to those things with, you know, a full proper understanding of the impact.
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So in, so in these family dynamics and in these centers, these kids show up and they were demanding
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this from their parents yesterday and their whole household has been in chaos because this
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kid has decided that the best thing for them right now is to start testosterone tomorrow.
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And I don't even know how you can, okay, part of medical ethics and part of actual consenting
00:31:59.120
has to be that you're not under any undue influence.
00:32:05.060
So we think about that sometimes in, in really, you know, bad medical case.
00:32:11.700
Like if you were just told you have cancer and you, and it's potentially, you know, a very
00:32:18.180
bad cancer, we don't want to tell you 10 minutes later, would you like to be in this research
00:32:24.260
study for this drug? Because we're putting you in an undue influence. And sometimes we even say,
00:32:31.580
maybe you're, maybe the person who's going to treat your cancer shouldn't be the person who
00:32:36.560
asks you if you want to do this procedure. It should be somebody neutral. So you're,
00:32:41.080
you know, so we think about these things in medical ethics. In medical ethics, those young
00:32:47.660
people, I believe, are in a situation where they have undue influence. They are being influenced
00:32:54.560
by a socially mediated cultural phenomenon. And the only way that they truly could give consent
00:33:02.580
to that treatment is if they have been out of that phenomenon and out of that social pressure
00:33:08.360
for long enough, i.e. potentially an adult, to then provide that real consent. Or, or we could
00:33:16.860
just, you know, shut off all social media and tell them they can't look at this stuff and then ask
00:33:22.640
them, you know, if you have a, if you have a 15 year old girl who's in the middle of this belief
00:33:27.460
and we put her in the middle of Montana with no internet access on a horse farm, she potentially
1.00
00:33:35.240
might not want testosterone 12 months down the line, but that's the level they're, they're under
00:33:40.760
so much influence. It's from their school, it's from their peers, it's from the social media,
00:33:45.220
and they want this right now. That makes sense. But Jamie, on top of all of that, though,
00:33:51.920
it's a kind of basic principle of our societies that children can't consent to anything really.
00:33:57.180
Right. You can't, you can't drink or take drugs or have sex, lots of other much more,
00:34:03.940
much less significant things in terms of the impact on your life and the lives of other people
00:34:08.200
around you. You can't get a bad tattoo and be stuck with it. You have to be 18 to get bad tattoos.
00:34:15.940
So you can get a tattoo. You can't get a tattoo, but you can get, you can get hormones and potentially
00:34:22.040
double mastectomy. Is that not, is that just, I mean, sorry, but is that not insane?
00:34:36.960
I'm not having a go at you. I'm trying to flesh out the issue itself. Do you see what I'm saying?
00:34:46.080
But, and Jamie, again, there is no blame attached to this. What we're trying to do
00:34:50.180
is we're just trying to understand how these places work. And you say it wasn't obvious to you.
00:34:58.900
So many of the, the people who worked, who I worked with, and I think that a lot of the people
00:35:09.620
that work in these centers and in medicine and in pediatrics in general have a huge heart.
00:35:15.760
They really do care. And they really do think that this is the way to help these kids.
00:35:23.360
And I also think that when you are faced with so much distress, so much chaos, these kids are hurting.
00:35:37.040
They are maybe saying that they're suicidal, that they're self-harming, that they are, they are
00:35:41.980
struggling. I think on some level, it's easier to say, well, we'll give you what you want than to
00:35:49.200
stand up and be the grownup and say, no, we're not doing that right now. And instead we have to
00:35:55.720
do other things. And then we also have to support the parents because if you have parents who have
00:36:02.840
been trying to deal with their kid, who's been demanding testosterone, demanding this new name,
00:36:10.700
demanding these new pronouns, demanding these clothes and this, and these kids are telling their
00:36:15.720
parents, it's the only thing that's going to keep me from killing myself. How do we support those
00:36:20.240
parents to also say, no, we need to slow down and we need to think about this?
00:36:26.260
Do you think part of the problem is, and I'm going to go back to the litigious point,
0.74
00:36:30.200
is that these clinics are worried that if they don't do something, and then let's say the kid does
00:36:35.520
something rash or, you know, what, you know, tries to kill themselves, that they are then going to be
00:36:42.080
held responsible for not putting correct interventions in place? Because someone will
00:36:46.680
come to them and go, look, this kid said they were suicidal. They said they were gender dysphoric.
00:36:52.080
You chose not, you chose not to give the correct procedures. So we just call it like that
00:36:58.180
in place. As a result, this kid attempted suicide. You're at fault.
00:37:03.140
So my answer is complicated here. So I've worked with young people who are expressing suicidal
00:37:12.440
ideations thoughts for a really long time. I am not trying to downplay suicidal thoughts in trans
00:37:22.420
kids. But I saw more suicides in kids within the foster care system and kids who were HIV positive
00:37:35.840
as a young person than we saw in the pediatric gender center. And a lot of the kids in the gender
00:37:48.500
center, their suicidal thoughts are different. So oftentimes, when we would send them, these are seen
00:38:03.560
more as threats and not attempts. That's not to say that we didn't have patients who did have true
00:38:13.500
suicidal ideations. But I think as a whole, the statistics do not show that there are that
00:38:30.500
And very much on that subject, and I know it's a tricky thing to ask you, but I feel like I should.
00:38:36.320
We've heard from other guests that quite often, because this idea of being trans or whatever is
00:38:43.320
social media driven, the kids are actually getting instructions on how to talk to somebody like
00:38:49.260
you to get what they need. So not all of them, but some of them are coming in and saying,
00:38:56.460
oh, I'm suicidal, because they know that's what gets the thing that they want. Is that happening?
00:39:01.360
It is. But the thing that scares me a little bit too, is that some of the parents are doing the same
00:39:06.900
thing. So I had some parents who would call to complete an intake with me. And they would describe
00:39:14.260
the situation. And I would say, hey, from what you're describing, it sounds like your kid is just
00:39:20.140
experiencing some normal gender questioning. It does not warrant the need to be seen in a gender
00:39:27.120
center. And then they would sometimes press me and find out kind of, well, what are the things that
00:39:33.120
warrant you being seen in a gender center? And then magically, mom would call me back
0.97
00:39:40.760
a month later. And now suddenly, kiddo has expressed exactly what I told mom was needed to meet that
00:39:50.520
criteria. I had parents even tell me things like, my kid likes to play with this toy. And then they
00:40:00.860
would tell me that they went and bought all of the kids books they could find on Amazon about being
00:40:05.980
trans and that they had hidden and sprinkled the trans kids books all throughout the house
0.82
00:40:11.640
for their kids to find. And those were cases that just, there's something going on.
00:40:22.340
And I know it's unfair to ask you to speculate about other people's intentions, but do you have any
00:40:27.880
sense of why a parent would want to do that? I think you had a guest on maybe before who talked
00:40:36.920
a little bit about how, you know, to be a really, to be a truly good liberal parent right now is to
00:40:44.240
kind of allow your kid to, it's like gone so far in one direction where, you know, if your kid expresses
00:40:54.840
the slightest non-gender type role, you know, you immediately need to start affirming and asking
00:41:04.140
them. I mean, I had parents talk about how they would have all their kids close their eyes in like
00:41:09.340
a circle in their house in some like weird seance-y thing and then open their eyes and tell us what
00:41:16.980
your inner gender is now. So this is parents literally seeding these ideas into the heads of
00:41:28.380
My question is, and by the way, just for clarification, I don't know if you know this,
00:41:33.020
I was a teacher for a long time and I taught across all sectors and I taught in girls' schools as well.
00:41:38.500
So I saw how social contagion worked, particularly with young girls.
00:41:42.820
When I taught in girls' schools, it was late noughties. So back then, there wasn't really
00:41:48.180
any of the trans stuff. It was mainly anorexia. But I look at this and I go, that's child abuse.
00:41:56.720
That is child abuse. Because if I was a teacher and I heard that this was being done to a kid
00:42:02.640
who I was teaching, I would report them to social services. That would be my duty as a teacher in the
00:42:09.940
UK. And if I didn't do that, I would not be fulfilling my role. I would not be, as we called
00:42:21.680
Yes. And there were a few cases where I would agree with you.
00:42:26.060
And that is also part of the problem in the media right now. Because oftentimes the parents
00:42:37.580
that are so gung-ho to talk to the news about how this saved their kid's life and how their
00:42:43.940
kid is doing so well are like these really hardcore activist parents who bought all the way in.
00:42:57.300
And why is this ideology so powerful? Why is it that it can take hold of people like this
00:43:04.860
to the point that they do this to their own children and create significant long-term harm?
00:43:13.000
So in the liberal view right now in the United States, there is this huge kind of, so to be a white
0.96
00:43:32.000
person in the United States with privilege and to be middle class and to be able to afford things for
00:43:39.220
your kids. And to be able to kind of, to be in this privileged position is seen as a negative for a lot
00:43:51.680
of liberal people. And so I do feel like being trans has become this thing that you can't question.
00:44:03.160
So you, you can't really easily change. You can't say you're of a different race in the United States.
00:44:10.620
You can't claim ethnic background if you don't have it. You can't, I mean, who's going to claim that
0.94
00:44:16.180
they're poor? I mean, and if you, if you identify as gay or lesbian, you know, that gets uncomfortable
00:44:26.880
pretty quickly if you, if you're not really gay or lesbian, but for these young people, you can claim
00:44:34.500
that you're non-binary and throw they them pronouns up and, and suddenly you're in the, you're in the
00:44:42.980
group that's no longer the oppressor. You are in the oppressed group. And I think part of why this has
00:44:51.800
such these strong tentacles is nobody in my country ever wants to tell somebody who's in, you know,
00:44:59.120
what we view as an oppressive group that they're not, and nobody wants to be seen as the oppressor.
00:45:07.040
And, but, and I accept that. And again, this is, there is no blame attached to this whatsoever.
00:45:13.480
I'm just exploring. What about the adults? What about the medical professionals? Isn't it their
00:45:22.260
job to make that decision? That's what you went to college for. That's what you studied. That's why
00:45:27.520
you put yourself through a medical degree. That's why you're in that position for you to make that
00:45:33.720
choice. Do you see what I mean? And to me, but you, but the culture is so harsh right now that
00:45:43.320
if they were to say no to a patient, then they were going to get, you're going to get blasted on
0.97
00:45:50.360
social media that you're a transphobic doctor that you. And what does that mean? Because on social
00:46:00.160
media, you're blinded as a transphobic doctor. What does that mean for your career? What does that
00:46:03.860
mean for your prospects? What does that mean for the way people perceive you?
00:46:07.520
Um, I can speak from my own position, which is that I am the, I am the hated outsider. Um, I, um, I,
00:46:19.480
I was in a very interesting position to become a whistleblower. I'm basically a Luddite. I,
00:46:27.000
I, I had no social media to speak of. I had nothing to get destroyed or taken away from me. My Twitter,
00:46:34.740
I had none of that. I, I'm an old school Luddite. And I also was an anarchist in the nineties. And,
00:46:43.060
you know, I remember the black block and the WTO protests and I lived in an anarchist collective.
00:46:48.180
Like I kind of had a really thick skin, but I also remember those kinds of politics. And I remember,
00:46:55.300
um, standing up for something and, and knowing that even if you're going to get,
00:47:02.960
you know, everybody pile on you, that, that you'll find that, that the other activists are
00:47:09.360
out there, they might be small and it might be a small group, but, but I felt firm enough in my own
00:47:16.000
internal convictions. And I worry that we're in a culture right now because of the way social media
00:47:23.220
has changed, that it's so external. The judgment is so external, not internal that for so many people,
00:47:28.880
even adults. It takes a lot of strength to, to go up against your dominant culture.
00:47:35.960
It does. And, uh, that's one of the reasons I really want to thank you for, for coming out and,
00:47:40.420
and talking about this because I think it's super important. And one of the things we haven't yet
00:47:45.700
talked about in detail is what happened internally when you started speaking up about this, because you
00:47:52.860
started to ask questions, didn't you? I did. Um, I started asking questions often and it got to the
00:47:59.400
point where I even was having conversations one-on-one with the doctor saying, I, we are
00:48:04.800
harming children. We are doing this. Um, what would they say? So it's interesting because I, I only
00:48:12.500
recently read the Hannah Barnes book about the Tavistock and I was, it was almost the exact same
00:48:18.180
response, which I was told my tone was wrong, that I was, I shouldn't be directly challenging
00:48:24.600
doctors in team meetings, that I was out of my lane, that I was, um, it was almost identical what
00:48:32.520
happened at Tavistock. Um, and the way that I was kind of treated was I was the annoying squeaky
00:48:39.380
wheel. Oh, we know Jamie's gonna have another issue. And it got to the point in the center where
00:48:45.380
there was a, an actual directive that we were no longer allowed to use the phrase, I have concerns
00:48:56.400
about a patient. And in medicine, that should scare anyone because,
00:49:06.100
because if your surgeon comes in and the nurse thinks that they're drunk, sure as hell that nurse
00:49:14.500
should be able to say, I have concerns about this patient right now. And we need to stop.
00:49:19.300
We need medicine needs people who are empowered by their medical institution to speak up nurses,
00:49:29.360
social workers, case managers. You think someone was given the wrong dose. You think they're going
00:49:33.820
to cut off the wrong limb. Like you have to have all of these layers in medicine, have to have people
00:49:39.180
who are empowered and encouraged to stand up. And instead it was routinely be quiet, stop, you're
00:49:47.820
wrong, be quiet, stop. And it got to the point finally, where we were told get on board or get out.
00:49:58.220
You say we, were there other people at the center who agreed with you?
00:50:01.620
We, we didn't always agree for the same reasons, but there were a few other people who, who agreed.
00:50:12.380
Yeah. And you mentioned speaking directly one-on-one with doctors. So if you come to a doctor
00:50:18.840
in that sort of clinic and you would say, I think we're harming the, these children,
00:50:24.100
other than shut up and stop raising it, did they, did they have any counter arguments or any explanation
00:50:30.840
for why you, what they were doing, what they were doing?
00:50:34.540
Um, sometimes it would be, well, what do you want me to do instead?
00:50:44.000
And I think part of that is that the whole model of care is so
00:50:49.880
upside down right now that it's like every, that they're, that the doctors are even just a cog in the
00:50:58.460
spinning machine. And they're like, the only way I know how to spin is this way. Like you're telling
00:51:03.320
me we're hurting people, but they would be like, what, how do I do differently? Because then it
00:51:09.020
would have to stop. It was almost like for them to actually stop and think would have to stop the
00:51:17.000
whole mechanism. The whole machine would have to stop because it's not just their portion. It's the
00:51:23.460
therapist portion. It's the parents portion. It's the kids themselves. It's the hospital. It's like
00:51:27.740
all this whole machine is spinning. And, and they were like, what, what do I do? And I guess in some
00:51:35.480
ways I just got to the point where I was like, you know, this whole machine just has to stop right
00:51:41.120
now because the way that it's going is just, it's not. It sort of sounds what you're describing is
00:51:48.320
like a little bit like a conveyor belt where it's like, yeah. Right. And then you're going up to one
00:51:53.880
person at one point and you're going, well, don't put this bit in. And they're going, well,
00:51:57.940
there's a whole machine here. There's a whole conveyor belt. You know, this is my job. I give
00:52:01.720
four months or I do this or I do that. Right. Yes, exactly. And this is what they call the
00:52:06.500
affirmative model where essentially the moment a kid says I'm dysphoric from that point on,
00:52:13.040
they're just on the conveyor belt and there's no getting off unless they themselves have a change of
00:52:18.120
heart. Right. As long as the kid is saying, I want that as the end, then that's what the kid's going to get.
00:52:22.820
Yeah. And you said upside down and that really is upside down because as we talked about earlier,
00:52:28.140
a child cannot really consent, but they are driving this whole thing is what you're telling us.
00:52:32.660
Oh, that the language even in some of the activist groups is that you're supposed to be child led,
00:52:38.540
that the child's supposed to be leading this. And here's the thing about kids. Kids who think that
00:52:44.620
they're the ones who are supposed to make the decision are actually in more distress and are in more
00:52:51.280
pain because they feel like there's no grownups in the room who are in charge. And as a parent,
00:53:02.380
I know for my own kids, they do better in life when I can say things to them like, hey,
00:53:09.100
this is not your decision. We're the grownups. We've got this handled. We know what we're doing.
00:53:15.740
You can go be a kid. Do not worry about these things. And as they get older, you maybe add a
00:53:22.920
little bit more like, no, at Disneyland, you cannot buy the whole toy store because
00:53:27.400
grownups only have this much money. And you slowly start giving them some senses of choice. But no,
00:53:35.440
a 14 year old does not want to think that they have to make the decision for what the whole rest of
00:53:41.680
their life is for their fertility and for their medical care.
00:53:46.200
No, I mean, it's absolutely spot on. It's why all this child centered, I see, I saw it towards
00:53:52.680
the end of my time in education. They called it child centered learning where the child was in
00:53:57.700
charge of their learning. And I was like, I don't think an eight year old should be in charge of
00:54:01.680
their learning. It's just, I don't think an eight year old should be in charge of my dinner choice
00:54:07.120
for tonight because they're not going to choose. I mean, no, yeah. Ice cream and jello for you
00:54:13.560
tonight. Yeah. Jamie, listen, we joke, of course, but the one thing, look, I became a parent about
00:54:19.820
11 months ago, you know, and when I think about this, that's the prison through which I'm thinking
00:54:25.380
about. I've got this beautiful baby boy. He's pure potentiality. He's growing up. He's wonderful.
00:54:32.060
And then fast forward a few years and they fly by. And let's say he's been on TikTok or whatever,
00:54:40.200
which he's not going to be at this rate, but let's say that he was. And we, he says that he's
00:54:45.700
experiencing distress. The household is in turmoil, as you described. And we, the good parents,
00:54:51.780
take them to professionals for help. And then three months later, he's on puberty blockers
00:55:02.080
and estrogen. And, and, and in, in the case that you described, some of them are taking like cancer
00:55:08.520
drugs. Yep. Yeah. I mean, the question I think parents would want to ask you, Jamie, is what should
00:55:17.440
you do if that is what happens to your child? I think that's a really good question. And first of
00:55:24.120
all, there are a whole lot of parents out there who can answer this question also. And what I found
00:55:29.880
frustrating with the media is there are a lot of parents who wanted to talk to my local media
00:55:35.160
because they had a kid in that situation and they knew better than to take their kid to the center that
00:55:42.340
I work at. They already figured it out. I cannot go there. I cannot take my kid there unless I want
00:55:48.880
X, Y, and Z as the outcome. But again, parents can be a parent. One of the things as the caseworker
00:55:57.380
in the center, I found really shocking for a lot of these parents is you do get to have some of the
00:56:03.800
control and say over your child's social media use. There are parental controls. My poor kids,
00:56:10.180
their cell phones, still sleep in the kitchen. You don't, you don't have your cell phone with you
00:56:15.280
in the middle of the night in your room at 12. That's insane. Nobody needs that. And the parents
00:56:21.620
would be like, oh, well, they use sleep music. I'm like, no, get this, put some levers and controls
00:56:28.860
back in being a parent. But also, these kids right now are under a lot of mental health stress and
00:56:39.460
issues. And you need to find a good pediatrician. If you think your kid is expressing, you know,
00:56:46.340
anxiety or depression, regardless of the gender, focus on those things. Focus on the basics. These
00:56:52.640
kids are kids who are not going to school very well or often, need friends groups, need to go outside and
00:57:00.120
get exercise, need to sleep. We are seeing that a ton of these kids had terrible sleep hygiene,
00:57:06.320
need to eat real food. I mean, some of these things are from, you know, the beginnings,
00:57:12.000
the basics as parents, as do these healthy things from the start. And then if your kid does come to
00:57:18.500
you and say they're experiencing X, Y, and G things about their gender, my answer is normally
0.99
00:57:24.540
normative gender exploration is fine. Wear whatever clothes you want within reason. You still have to
1.00
00:57:32.220
be dressed. I don't care what your hair looks like. I don't care if you're a boy and you want to wear
0.99
00:57:37.980
makeup or nail polish. Who cares? Let those social gender things, can we actually like be a little bit
1.00
00:57:46.540
more flexible with those things? Let your kids explore. But no, you don't need to change everybody's
00:57:54.360
pronouns. Your name cannot change 12 times. If you want a nickname, fine. But no, you don't need a binder.
00:58:00.320
You don't need, you don't need to do all of these things and you really do not need to be medically
00:58:06.140
intervening. Let them explore and give them a way out. Tell them as the parent, explore this stuff. Try
00:58:16.120
this on. But if you try this and you don't like it, then we can change. We can go back. You can get
00:58:22.240
different clothes. You can grow your hair back out. Don't pigeonhole your kid into this, into this thing.
00:58:28.340
And Jamie, what about the detransitioners? What about the kids who've gone through the conveyor belt
00:58:35.180
and they've had the, you know, the surgeries and medicalization? They've come out the other side.
00:58:41.500
They've realized that this has all been a horrendous mistake. What happens to them?
00:58:46.680
The medical establishment right now is completely, completely ignoring them and pretending like they
00:58:56.760
don't exist. So the centers don't see them. There really is no care provided. And
00:59:06.380
I think that part of my hope for centers like this is that not only do we actually pause this
00:59:19.460
crazy experiment that's going on, but then also really focus on providing medical support and care
00:59:29.640
for all of those kids. And I also think we do need to recognize that there are going to be
00:59:35.380
long-term outcomes that might need some legal financial support. Because if you are like Chloe
00:59:45.180
Cole and you had a double mastectomy at 13 and you're now just now 18, the financial damages
00:59:54.260
for her could not even really be calculated. Probably it would have to look at her whole
01:00:03.440
lifetime. What has this done to her fertility, her, her bonding with her child, her ability to
01:00:08.920
breastfeed, like those things deserve a financial answer. And hopefully also that we stop doing this
0.79
01:00:17.200
to anyone else. Well, Jamie, to read between the lines and to summarize it in the blunt Russian way
0.93
01:00:23.600
as only I can, it sounds like what you're saying is this is a medical malpractice scandal on a large
01:00:29.760
scale that is going to blow up in people's faces very soon, in your opinion, or at least should blow up
01:00:36.180
in people's faces very soon. Yeah, I think you kind of nailed it.
01:00:41.960
Well, you know what, when you get someone on the show to talk about it, who's, you know,
01:00:49.740
is a journalist or they have an opinion for, you know, they talk for a living and whatever,
01:00:54.320
you sort of go, well, you know, are you qualified to talk about it? But, you know, talking to you
01:00:58.620
about it has really clarified a lot of things in my mind because you've seen it from the inside and
01:01:03.560
you were involved in, you know, working with this. I suppose the one counter argument people sometimes
01:01:08.700
make is I have heard some people who are on board with this stuff say that, oh, detransitioners are
01:01:14.800
a very small percentage. You know, any medical treatment has some people who are not happy with
01:01:19.860
the outcome. If you go and have some kind of, you know, if you go and get a hip replacement,
01:01:24.900
there's a whatever percent failure and people get upset that the hip didn't get replaced correctly.
01:01:34.080
Yes, there are, there are definite medical interventions that are done that can have poor
01:01:43.040
outcomes. However, this is systematic. This is almost universal. And this is not even touching on the,
01:01:55.980
the outcomes that we are also. So an outcome of somebody who's detransitioning.
01:02:04.540
But the outcome of somebody who is 13 and put on testosterone by 26, they're potentially going to
01:02:11.340
also be on a cholesterol medication, a diabetes medication, have heart complications, have an
01:02:16.660
early cardiac arrest. We know that these drugs just longitudinally are not healthy, good
01:02:25.640
drugs. They're harsh. They're hard on the body. These are hard things to continuously have to use.
01:02:33.720
And so I think part of the reason why it's, it's just a broader medical scandal is that
01:02:40.300
even in the best case outcome, where someone's happy with that transition, their body is still going to
01:02:49.020
have medical problems and complications from the use of these drugs. And also, I think just as
01:02:55.620
a society, I thought we had gotten to the point where we were done sterilizing kids. Just, I just
01:03:02.940
thought we were done doing that. And recognize that to be its own kind of problematic thing that we
01:03:13.100
weren't, we weren't going to be doing that anymore. And I'm also a gay person. And I just feel like
01:03:19.620
we're also kind of, what are we doing to this whole group of kids that are potentially just gay kids?
0.85
01:03:27.440
The phrase people use is, you're transing away the gay.
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01:03:31.320
Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's been an uplifting episode anyway.
01:03:38.840
But Jamie, thank you so much for coming on and for speaking openly and honestly. We, everybody
01:03:45.080
here salutes your bravery. And I'm sure there's going to be tens of thousands, if not hopefully
01:03:50.240
hundreds of thousands of people who are going to be listening to your words. And they're going to be
01:03:55.440
protecting kids and they're going to be better informed to this situation. Before we let you go,
01:04:02.600
the last question we ask all our guests is, what's the one thing that we're not talking about as a
01:04:11.380
It's strange, but I'm going to say homophobia. So I think that part of the trans epidemic is that
01:04:21.440
kids did not feel and do not feel like it's okay to be gay. And a lot of the spaces and a lot of the
01:04:30.920
support that I had as a gay kid has, has disappeared. So there was a gay coffee house, there were gay
1.00
01:04:40.520
bars, there was a gay culture. And it was, I thought we were getting to the point as a society that it was
01:04:49.880
okay to be gay. And now so many of these trans kids tell us directly in the center that it's,
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01:04:56.420
it's not, and that they feel like it, it's almost better to be trans and have a lifetime of medical
0.79
01:05:02.920
problems. And that means we have to go back to square one and really deal with homophobia.
01:05:10.080
Jay Marie, thank you so much for coming on the show. We're going to ask you a few questions from
01:05:14.200
our supporters that only they will get to see the answers to. We're going to make sure to put a link to
01:05:18.620
the article that you published about this. And I really recommend everybody, you know,
01:05:23.780
sorry to use this problematic phrase, but man up and read it because it's, it's pretty,
01:05:28.200
pretty difficult reading, frankly, but needs reading if you want to be informed about this issue.
01:05:33.160
And thank you for coming on. Is, is there anywhere other than the article that people should go to,
01:05:42.560
Good. You're the Luddite, uh, as, as you, you started as a Luddite and you're sticking to your principles.
01:05:49.060
I love it. Well, listen, thank you for coming on the show. Thank you guys for watching and listening.
01:05:53.560
Uh, see you on Locals with the bonus questions very, very shortly.
01:05:58.720
Annie says, uh, what does Jamie think we need to do to stop this from continuing?