The video of her testimony at The Dangers of “Gender-Affirming Care” for Minors | Federal Trade Commission is very sad and powerful. From the transcript:
"Good afternoon. My name is Jamie Reed and I hold a master's of science in Clinical Research
Management from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. I am also a lifelong Democrat, a mom of
five boys, three of whom were adopted out of the foster care system and I'm a lesbian. I am also the
public whistleblower from inside a pediatric gender center. I participated in transitioning nearly 1,500
unique patients who ranged in age from 3 to 26 over almost five years, I was once a true believer in
pediatric gender medicine. Now I understand. I participated in an industry that was based on fraud,
deception, and in layman's terms "we were running a racket". Patients with significant comorbidities
were treated using unethical and deceptive informed consent practices. They were never properly
assessed, informed of their condition or given a diagnosis. A diagnosis itself is the first required step for any consent to be valid and not fraudulent. These were also vulnerable patients who required specific
special safeguards.
First, they were minor patients and should have been provided all of the safeguarding protections we
would want for all children. Second, they had significantly presenting comorbidities, often falling within
the definition of a stigmatizing complex medical disease, some even meeting the criteria for a legal
medical disability. We were harming disabled children. These comorbidities include but are not limited
to autism spectrum disorders, anxiety, depression, borderline personality disorders, eating disorders,
self-harming behaviors, somatization disorders, learning disabilities, ADHD, and significant trauma
histories. Third, many of the presenting patients before the social contagion cohort, would eventually, if
not medically treated, become homosexuals like me. That is they will identify as adults as gay, lesbian or
bisexual. The entire diagnosis is based on regressive stereotypes and self-described feelings from minor
children and their parents. My clinical experience shows that these quote "biopsychosocial assessments
are not consistent, comprehensive, or truly diagnosis diagnostic"
For an assessment to be diagnostic, there is a very simple way to prove if it actually is so. It so simple
that so many of us actually forget it. There must be a statistically significant number of patients who will
not ever meet the diagnostic criteria. So in lay terms, there has to be a statistically significant number of
patients and parents who would've been consistently told no by these centers. That never happens. I
might hold a master's of science and clinical research that is not a requirement to understand the basic
concept of medical diagnostics. Parents and the public have been deceived into believing that these
assessments are diagnostic, that they're consistent, that they're comprehensive, and that no child is
ever receiving treatment without one. If the assessment met the criteria of consistent, comprehensive
and diagnostic, the diagnostic provider should be able to easily produce their assessment tools, give
them to the FTC to be analyzed, and they should also be universally consistent across all of our states.
This has never happened and they have not shared any data to show a percentage of those presented
are being told no because this is not happening.
But, and this is a huge "but", even if this field was actually doing what it claimed to do, even if it was
completing a true biopsychosocial assessment and saying no to a significant percentage of the patient
population, please know that those who would be told yes would be homosexuals, like me, and
especially the gender-nonconforming homosexuals. Under the Dutch model, we would still be okay to
be rendered sterile without sexual function, with destroyed endocrine systems and be allowed to die
early simply because we are gender non-conforming homosexuals. And so to some of those not here
today to Laura Edwards-Leeper, to Annelou De Vries, we homosexuals are no longer okay to be harmed
for straight people's comfort and we are fighting back.
I personally witnessed the consequences of prescribing these treatments without proper informed
consent, one of my patients after her radical bilateral mastectomy at 19 called begging for her breasts to
be put back on. This harm has not been contained to children or minors. Another patient's intellectual
function was so impaired that they could not identify to me where they lived or explained what type of
identification they possessed. Multiple staff members expressed concern about their ability to consent
to any medical procedure. Despite these and similar red flags with many patients, this patient even
stated that they desired to have biological children, yet they were prescribed a treatment that would
ultimately render them sterile for life. We as clinicians in the gender industry openly stated, "It does not
matter if patients even met the diagnostic criteria". We did not care. If patients even had "gender
dysphoria." We did not care if a patient said they were trans, then they were trans. Parents were
unaware that patients were self-diagnosing, that clinicians had completely abandoned the diagnostic
process entirely. Parents who didn't agree with our lives were isolated, abandoned by our centers. We
tore married parents apart and we tore children apart from caring parents who told us no.
Imagine in a different field if children went in self-declaring that they had a malignant cancer, if they
went to an oncologist and that oncologist without labs or biopsies, if that child demanded to go through
chemotherapy and surgery, that the clinicians would comply and then the clinicians would then bill our
insurance for those procedures, medical visits, making money for the hospitals and themselves based on
this deception. This is precisely what we were doing in the gender center. And then we expanded this
deception into a racket. We created specific lists of affirming therapists who would do exactly what we
wanted. A therapist could only get on that list if they would comply. We needed a letter for insurance.
So guess what we did? We wrote it. We made it fill in the blank. We pre-drafted it. And I know this
because I am the one who not only created this letter, but I emailed it out to all of those same therapists
for hundreds of our patients.
I wish I could say to you that I became a whistleblower the first time I heard the nurse say, "But Dr.
Lewis, we are committing insurance fraud." Because that was said, and I wish I spoke up sooner. The
final death blow to my ethical medical soul, and what finally led me to speak up, is that we significantly
harmed our patients. We didn't just deceive them or their parents. I hurt children. And I said to that
same Dr. Chris Lewis, "Chris, we are harming patients." And he said, "I know, but what do you want me
to do about it?" I hurt the very children I was employed to protect. St. Louis Children's Hospital. Mission
statement is simple. St. Louis Children's Hospital will do what is right for children. We did not. And all of
us must now reckon with what we have collectively done."
