Debunking the Debunking
Part 1: Neo Pronouns
The Statement
The statement from Jamie Reed’s affidavit reads: “Children come into the clinic using pronouns of inanimate objects like “mushroom,” “rock,” or “helicopter.”
Found on page 15, Number 59 of the affidavit.
The Claims
Claim by Evan Urquhart from Assigned Media: “In allegation 59, Reed claimed “children come into the clinic using pronouns of inanimate objects like ‘mushroom,’ ‘rock,’ or ‘helicopter.” Even sympathetic bloggers seeking to vindicate Reed have produced evidence that calls this absurd bit of nonsense into doubt.”
Corroboration
What does it mean when something is corroborated? Corroborating evidence is a collection of facts and information that backs up someone’s story. In a court of law corroborating evidence is used to uphold the testimony of a witness.
Documents that follow were shared with Azeen Ghorayshi for the New York Times article.
Corroborating Evidence
Document 1.
Text message from December 12, 2022 at 11:12am. Texts between Jamie Reed and the transgender center clinical nurse coordinator. Messages written by Jamie Reed are in blue.
Document 2.
Email from October 2022 from the clinical nurse coordinator to the pediatric transgender center team leadership.
A note on abbreviations. ED refers to the Emergency Department. SLCH stands for the St Louis Children’s Hospital.
Document 3.
Email from October 2022 from Jamie Reed to the pediatric transgender center team leadership.
Document 4.
Email Preferred Names- Nontraditional January 2021
Next weeks post will address the questions regarding regarding the ‘attack helicopter’ and finally bicalutamide. If there are other commonly raised issues that need to have ‘debunking of the debunking’ please include them in the comments section.
I am curious, do you have any documentary evidence-and perhaps you intend to cover this in the upcoming discussion of the attack helicopter thing-of any really bizarre pronouns from a different time frame, or with anything other than "mushroom"? I ask because since all 3 messages you presented were from the same 2-3 month period in 2022, I believe it's very possible that they are all discussing one individual who was clearly causing some...issues... Throughout the whole of the hospital and not just the gender clinic. And while it certainly indicates that Ms Reed was truthful in her testimony, at the same time one individual does not a trend make, you know? I'm excluding the "it" pronouns from that statement because that actually seems to be a relatively common reference to trans people, by gender ideologists as well as GC folks, and because in my book "it" just isn't as completely ridiculous as "mushroom" or whatever.
Overall, thank you for doing this. I think it's really important to provide fact checks to fact checkers, and it doesn't happen often enough imo. Thanks for taking the time and effort to ensure the real information gets out.
On another note, I'm wondering why anyone is making such a big deal out of an adolescent's preferred name being "traditional" or not, unless they are actually taking steps to apply to change it legally... Gender stuff aside here, first off parents (of all ages) name their kids all kinds of bizarre and probably unwise things all the time. But that's a legal name and much more of a problem imo. But kids, and actually adults too, frequently have strange nicknames. My take on that is, who cares? A nickname can change as a person matures. In my mind that's not where we should be focusing our efforts here. It's pretty harmless, and it's also not going to have all the same psychological effects as a full social transition because almost every child changes their preferred name repeatedly through the years. I repeatedly, and adamantly, adopted different versions of my given name while insisting no one use the one I preferred prior because I was now older and too mature for such a baby name. My own sibling, as a full grown adult in grad school, adopted a nickname that is usually a noun, and not name. She hasn't changed it legally, but used it in her wedding ceremony and even uses it on her work email signature and so on. While our parents were less than pleased about it being used at her wedding, it doesn't seem to have caused her any real problems in life. She's an intelligent person and has no gender concerns nor any other mental health issues, and has a very successful career and is quite high functioning, all while being called something that is just weird to hear as a name, even to me years after she began using it. So it's not a trans-specific phenomenon, and regardless I don't quite get all the consternation over something that, compared to surgeries and drugs and such, seems pretty minor and changeable.
I don't doubt Jamie encountered this. There are plenty of examples of people sharing their neopronouns on TikTok like clown, demon, frog/frogself etc. But the more interesting part of this issue is why all the adults in the room think they need to immediately adopt these pronouns, write them in medical charts, change records, etc. I think the nurse nailed it: "When do we stop indulging?" Using a nickname is fine to build rapport but they don't get coded into a person's records.
Trying to figure out which are the appropriate vs inappropriate neopronouns/names is distracting from the point that there are very real pressures on adults in these professional spaces to ignore their common sense in order to "respect" these silly terms in fear of some sort of consequence. That is the real problem IMO.