A former employee at a transgender clinic told Dr. Phil that she witnessed patients who had body parts surgically removed when they were children desperately plead to have them put back on.
Jamie Reed, who worked in patient intake and oversight at Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, went on Dr. Phil Primetime on Thursday to talk about why she changed her mind about the safety and efficacy of transgender hormone administration and surgical procedures.
Reed wrote an article last year about what she witnessed working at the center, including practices that she called “morally and medically appalling.”
Reed said the transgender center based its treatment on the idea “that transition would solve everything. That it would solve a child’s mental health problems.”
“There were very few written protocols or guidelines. One of the providers even said, ‘We were flying the plane as we built it,’” Reed claimed.
In her view, “Doctors are acting like they’re God when it comes to medically transitioning children.”
Reed described how children could be prescribed hormones “that would impact and change their bodies” for the rest of their lives.
Reed explained to host Dr. Phil, who holds a doctorate in clinical psychology, that clinics like the one she worked at see mostly teen girls wishing to become men. She postulated that this happens because girls are more influenced by social cues and trends within their peer groups.
Reed said she witnessed “a young person who was begging to have their breasts put back on after having surgery.”
Reed described transgender treatment as an “industry” that implements these life-altering and unnecessary treatments based often on just the whims of a child.
An astonished Dr. Phil responded by asking, “You’re telling me that a 12- or 13-year-old, who can’t decide which pajamas to wear, can come in and say, ‘I’ve decided that I want to transition,’ and with no more than a couple of hours or two visits — not even a couple of hours, two visits — they say, ‘Okay, start taking this, start doing this,’ which alters their biochemistry in a way that you can’t come back from?”
“Correct,” Reed replied.
Proponents of transgender hormone administration and sex-alteration surgery point to data suggesting that these medical procedures do help with mental health problems.
For instance, a Stanford-led study concluded that “transgender people who began hormone treatment in adolescence had fewer thoughts of suicide, were less likely to experience major mental health disorders and had fewer problems with substance abuse than those who started hormones in adulthood.”
But speaking with Joe Rogan on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast back in February, Dr. Phil argued that transgender procedures have been approved and implemented with very little research into whether they work.
“In fairness, all of the major medical associations have signed off on this, Joe. I have never seen these organizations sign off on anything with less information as to whether or not it does long-term harm of anything in my life,” Dr. Phil said, as reported by Fox News.
He said that those who say the treatment itself causes everlasting harm are labeled “transphobic.”
Dr. Phil said his response to that accusation is, “I thought the deal was ‘First, do no harm.’”
As The Dallas Express has recently reported, the evidence for the efficacy of sex-altering hormone administration and surgery is increasingly questioned by researchers and doctors.
In a testament to how high the stakes can be around the issue of transgender procedures, a Texas father is engaged in a court battle with his ex-wife over just such an issue. Jeff Younger spoke to DX about the custody battle over his 11-year-old biologically male child, whom the mother claims identifies as a girl. She has taken the child to California, where Younger fears she will allow a gender clinic to pursue castration.
Younger told DX that a Texas family court “stripped me of parental rights without possibility of appeal, just because I want to raise my son as a boy.”