Last month, ex-New York Times columnist Bari Weiss published a melodramatic account of alleged abuses at a gender clinic in her online publication, the Free Press. The account, written by “whistleblower” Jamie Reed, a former case manager at the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, charged doctors and administrators at the center of pushing children into premature or unwarranted gender transitions and bullying parents and staffers who objected into silence or acquiescence to the allegedly abusive treatment.
Reed’s account became a sensation in right-wing media, with numerous publications breathlessly and uncritically repeating the charges and the New York Post publishing an editorial on the subject with the inflammatory headline “End the horrors of the pediatric gender-industrial complex, now.”
But Reed’s accusations were picked up by a couple of prominent liberal/centrist pundits as well. Vox co-founder and Substack blogger Matthew Yglesias promoted Reed’s article on Twitter:
Meanwhile, New York magazine writer Jonathan Chait devoted multiple paragraphs to Reed’s claims in a longer piece on trans controversies, sometimes forgetting to slap the word “alleged” on her charges–writing, for example, that “last week, a whistleblower … published an account of the abuses she witnessed as a case manager at the Washington University Transgender Center ….” That should be the abuses she said she witnessed; they haven’t been proven.
In one case, Chait’s summary of Reed’s accusations was misleading at best. He wrote that
many of the outcomes Reed claims to have witnessed are unbearably sad: Children rushed onto hormones, or into surgery, coping with painful side effects or (in one case) asking to have their breasts back.
The wording implies that the top surgery was done on a child; in fact, the doctors waited until the woman, who later detransitioned, was a legal adult before operating.
Chait ends his piece by somberly warning that “if Reed’s allegations are proved correct, it will take its place among the gravest medical scandals in modern American history.”
Well, about that. While investigations of the clinic are ongoing, a detailed report by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch suggests that Reed’s claims of widespread abuse at the clinic are wildly inaccurate. According to the paper’s Colleen Schrappen,
almost two dozen parents of children seen at the clinic … say their experiences sharply contradict the examples supplied by Jamie Reed … [P]arents interviewed by the Post-Dispatch [also] cast doubt on Reed’s ability to know what happened inside exam rooms as an employee who did not have a medical or managerial role, and whom they rarely saw.
It’s worth quoting the report in detail.
Rather than the “rapid medicalization” and “poor assessment of mental health concerns” that Reed cited … parents reported a well-defined, step-by-step approach that could be halted at any time.
Slow, methodical adjustments began at home, long before medications were used: testing out new names, using different pronouns, cutting hair short or growing it long. The social transitions ran concurrently with mental health care, sometimes lasting years. Only then, parents said, was medication considered.
According to Schrappen,
Patients recounted that the staff explained procedures using both medical and everyday vocabulary.
“The doctor reached out to me after hours to answer my questions and make sure I understood what my treatment plan was,” said a 16-year-old from the St. Louis area.
Reed also claimed that the center “regularly refers minors for gender transition surgery.” However, a representative for the center flatly denies that surgery is ever done on anyone under 18.
Indeed, Schrappen tells the story of one teenager who pressed for surgery only to be rebuffed by doctors at the clinic
Surgery is what Christine Hyman’s 17-year-old son wanted from his very first appointment at the Transgender Center, when he was just 12. …
“Put it out of your mind. We don’t do that here,” Hyman, of St. Charles, recalled the nurse telling her son about surgery. “You don’t walk in Tuesday morning as a girl and walk out Tuesday afternoon as a boy. That’s not a thing.” …
Hyman’s son saw a therapist for more than a year — 89 times, Hyman said — before he started testosterone.
In the wake of the Post-Dispatch’s report, both Yglesias and Chait seem embarrassed by their earlier promotion of Reed’s charges, if not quite apologetic. They should be embarassed. Indeed, as author Julia Serano suggests on Twitter, those who uncritically pushed Reed’s “story (eg, Weiss, Chait, Yglesias) should never be taken seriously on this issue ever again.” That seems reasonable, to put it mildly.
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I think calling Bari Weiss a liberal is unfair. Joe Biden and I are liberals. Bari Weiss is pretty much Joe Manchin.
Seriously. Liberals and centrists are not the same thing.
Anybody who was still taking Bari Weiss seriously hadn’t been paying attention for the last several years anyway.
It’s pretty much impossible for a pundit, once they reach a certain level, to lose their place. My go to example is Bret Stephens who showed the world how unserious he is over the whole bed bug thing and all his talk of “free speech” went out the window when someone dared make a joke about him, yet days later I remember him showing up on an MSNBC panel and he’s still being published by the NYT.
Why exactly would the so-called whistleblower even make up something this extreme? Is it retaliation for a perceived slight from their employers, or just the hunger for their 15 minutes of fame?
I concur with @Aron and @Jenora Feuer about Bari Weiss. She is a dilettante’s dilettante and noted idiot. Yglesias is a wannabe contrarian in exactly the company he should be.
Why exactly would the so-called whistleblower even make up something this extreme?
The OP says she wasn’t actually a witness to actual treatments. So maybe she started listening to transphobic liars, and — with or without intending it — simply allowed their insane and triggering claims to fill in the gaps in her knowledge of what went on in the rooms she herself didn’t work in.
I’m not sure how embarrassed Chait really is. He still wants to pretend that what these claims _could_ have been true and the people pointing out they were obviously nonsense are all acting in bad faith when they suggest he is biased by his own transphobia.
While I expected no better of the NY Post, where the hell was the fact-checking at the “liberal” publications? If the Post-Dispatch could do it, the others also sure as hell could, so why didn’t they?
Could it be that the press has, in fact, a conservative bias, even the so-called “liberal” parts of it? Not even just on economic issues, where one would expect this due to their billionaire owners and giant corporate advertisers?
Even more ironic then that the right constantly whines about the media having a liberal bias.
The simplest possibility is that someone paid her to do it. Obviously, I have no idea whether that happened or not, but there have been cases of the right-wing finding a star witness who turns out to have been paid.
If that turns out to be what happened here, I vote we crowd-fund a defamation case.
If Bari Weiss’ career isn’t dead after this, it’s certainly in critical condition.
@Aron: I think “liberal” refers to Yglesias and Chait here, but agree that the headline isn’t right. Because no one with properly-working brains (and many without) thinks Weiss is a liberal.
Chait himself is not particularly liberal. Well, I mean he might be in his private life. But the inflammatory pieces he is best known for all lean conservative.
While it’s definitely a possibility to be considered, the people in our families who suddenly turn more hostile than they used to be years after we come out are not generally paid to do so. Generally it’s because they got involved in a more conservative version of Christianity and are now being asked to “repent” and put their past anti-jesus ways behind them through public acts of rejecting their previous ways.
If someone working at a clinic that treats people with GD converted to a theocratic version of Christianity, it would be expected that they would suddenly start talking about how evil the clinic is/was.
Because I’ve seen that happen so many times in our personal lives, it’s the #1 thought I have about the motivations about someone like this fake-whistleblower jackass.
Even the woman who was Jane Roe in Roe v. Wade started out speaking in small ways as religious penance before she ever took a dollar. It was only a big time grift for her later.
So the motivation for making things up would, in my opinion, be more likely to be religion. If the person keeps it up for months and years, they’re probably being paid.
About the RELIGION factor written in above comment. I don’t know if it’s objectively true or not but from where I’m sitting, it seems like the USA (even the world) is getting more religious, more fanatically religious. A few years ago there was a trend, probably started by Roosh, of Manosphere orbiters converting to Christianity. Now there’s a Red Pill Islamic conversion trend taking place.
And yeah, none of them are converting to liberal Christianity or soft Sufism.
AFAIK the “nones” continue to grow in numbers. But the devoutly not-“nones” are, in some cases, becoming more fanatical, going from quietly devout to loudly or even militantly devout; and a small but highly vocal minority are becoming “born again” seemingly more to acquire a “license to be a raving misogynist”, and perhaps to exploit the system in places where there are religious exemptions to anti-discrimination and hate speech laws. So, the latter conversions are unlikely to be in good faith.
I think also some of them (most clearly Doosh himself) are undergoing midlife crises, which has always been a (usually final) opportunity for fundie (and terrorist, Nazi, etc.) recruitment. Fear of mortality has always had a central role to play in both midlife crises and religion, after all. The healthier just shift their priorities from “how do I build more for myself/raise my children” to “how do I complete my life’s work and what legacy should I leave behind”; the less healthy run from confronting their mortality straight into the willing arms of anyone who will sell them some sort of “get out of death free” snake-oil. (Misogynists and particularly red-pillers will then find radical Islam’s promise of 72 eternal sex-slaves especially tempting, I expect.)
(Completing one’s life work and still finding oneself relatively hale can precipitate a further crisis, with the usual choices being ennui vs. hedonistic bucket-list-ticking.)
Dave, my last comment says “Awaiting for approval: Spam”
It might be because I used the b word. As in “love b*mb”.
It might be because I used the b word. As in “love b*mb”.
Since my comment is hung up in moderation I’ll just rewrite it without the b word.
I guess so. But some “nones” are those who are converting to Christianity and Islam. Apparently there’s a whole movement of young “Groypers” going “Trad Cath” (Catholic).
I don’t know what the turnover rate for that will be, but Islam seems to have a high turnover rate of converts “de-converting” within 5 years. And then you have children who are born into Muslim families who do not remain Muslim as they grow up, whether they openly say it or not.
Much of this conversion seems not to be because of spiritual awakenings but a search for community. One of the things Red Pillers say they admire about Islam is the “brotherhood”.
Religion remains to be a place where people can find an automatic group, an automatic non-blood related “family” and an automatic community. This appeals to lonely people. People looking for purpose and a reason to live.
Trolling and baiting “wokes” online can only last so long. After that these “based red pillars” have to find a reason to wake up in the morning and right now it seems religion is it.
Religionists “love b*mb” new converts so for at least a year those endorphins will be flowing.
Whether or not they stick with it remains to be seen.