The Unspeakable with Meghan Daum
The Unspeakable Podcast
Morally and Medically Appalling
10
0:00
-1:13:59

Morally and Medically Appalling

Jamie Reed blows the whistle on youth gender medicine.
10

Update: I’ve decided to make this episode available to all listeners, at least for the next few weeks. If you appreciate what you hear and are not yet a paying subscriber, I hope you will join our listener community.

Early access to the July 29, 2024 edition.

This is a premium episode with Jamie Reed. This episode is available to paid listeners. To hear the entire conversation, become a paying subscriber here.

Jamie will be in The Unspeakeasy as part of our Unspeakers Series on Aug. 7, 2024. Apply to join The Unspeakeasy now if you want the chance to meet her in a private, off-the-record hangout.

Apply now

“What is happening to scores of children . . . is morally and medically appalling.” Those were the words of Jamie Reed, a former case manager at a gender clinic in a major American children’s hospital, when she burst on the scene via a Free Press article in February 2023. Since then, she has become known as the most prominent whistleblower in the effort to put the brakes on medicalized gender transition for kids.

In this conversation, Jamie talks about what the last year and a half has been like for her, what the public still needs to understand about this issue,  and why doctors and other medical providers are continuing to misrepresent their treatment protocols. She discusses how institutions serving the most vulnerable kids, including foster care systems (where large numbers of kids now identify as trans), have adopted affirmative care models and explains what it’s like to

Testify before state legislatures about restricting access to non-evidence-based gender-affirming care. As a self-described “queer woman who’s married to a transgender person and is politically to the left of Bernie Sanders,” it’s the last thing she ever thought she’d be doing. Now it’s her life’s work.

Jamie Reed was a case manager at Washington University’s youth gender clinic in St. Louis. She became a whistleblower when she saw medically unethical treatments for transgender youth.

Guest Bio

Jamie Reed is one of the first public whistleblowers from a pediatric gender clinic in the United States and is now the Executive Director and Co-Founder of the LGBT Courage Coalition, an American-based non-profit of LGBT adults seeking to reform youth gender medicine. She has spoken at numerous conferences including Genspect: The Bigger Picture in Colorado, at the International Perspectives on Evidence- Based Treatment for Gender-Dysphoric Youth in New York, and Psychotherapeutic Process with Young People Experiencing Gender Dysphoria in Tampere, Finland.

Jamie is a gay woman and foster and adoptive parent of five boys. She holds a Master of Science in Clinical Research from Washington University in St. Louis and a bachelor’s degree in Cultural Anthropology.

Read the original story in The Free Press here.

Know someone who would love this episode? Give a gift subscription!

Give a gift subscription

Housekeeping

✈️ Unspeakeasy Retreats: See where we'll be in 2024!

🥂 Join The Unspeakeasy, my community for freethinking women.

🔥 Follow my other podcast, A Special Place in Hell.

Discussion about this podcast

The Unspeakable with Meghan Daum
The Unspeakable Podcast
The Unspeakable Podcast is a weekly interview show hosted by writer Meghan Daum. It's a place for conversations with writers, scientists, philosophers, artists and all kinds of interesting people about topics that have been deemed "unspeakable." Of the many podcasts offering nuanced conversations, this is the only one with official Nuanced AF merchandise available at the Nuance Store.
All archived episodes are here on Substack. You can also check out the ratings and reviews on Apple Podcasts if you want to see what other people are saying. And feel free to rate and review there as well as comment here.