Penna Dexter

There’s been much written lately about Jamie Reed’s piece for the online publication, The Free Press. Ms. Reed, who describes herself as “a queer woman, politically to the left of Bernie Sanders, now married to a transman,” worked for four years as a case manager at Washington University Transgender Center at the St. Louis Children’s Hospital. She left last November because she had come to believe that the treatment patients are receiving at her clinic and others is “the opposite of the promise we make to ‘do no harm.’”

Ms. Reed says doctors privately acknowledged the role of social contagion as clusters of girls showed up at the clinic. Still, patients received permanent transformations to their bodies after just “one or two conversations with a therapist”.

Jamie Reed’s article comes along as several states consider legislation to protect minors from gender transition procedures. Bills are moving through legislatures in Idaho, Kansas, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, and Tennessee.

Supporters and opponents of these bills are showing up at their statehouses in large numbers. Some medical professionals testify that there’s a suicide risk for minors unable to receive gender altering procedures. Others cite the physical and emotional harms of these procedures. One Idaho physician stated: “As a doctor who has sworn to do no harm, it is my duty to warn you against gender treatments that fundamentally alter a child’s healthy body.”

In Nebraska, in a seven-hour committee hearing, legislators heard the testimony of Scott Newgent who, at age 42, was told by doctors she was really a man trapped in a woman’s body. The Washington Stand published her description of the transition process which nearly killed her. She told committee members, “You cannot transition your pain away. You only add to it.” She encouraged them: “For you to do the right thing today, you will be considered a bigot. But tomorrow, you will be a hero.”

We need them to be heroes.