How I changed my mind.

Jamie Reed

I have been asked often how and why I changed my mind. Critics have said that I have been ‘red pilled.’ I didn’t know the reference when that was first leveled at me. I thought that it was being implied that I was somehow now ‘red,’ i.e. Republican. I know some can even level the criticism now: how the hell did this grown woman not know what ‘red pilled’ means?

Let me just own this: I am weird. My very recent foray onto Twitter is the first social media I have ever touched. Yes, I own an iPhone, but when I woke up every morning I would read (in this order): The New York Times, NPR, The Atlantic, maybe Mother Jones, then I would glance at the local headlines, check the weather. Once downstairs for breakfast, I would put on last night’s PBS News Hour and watch the previous night’s news. Then if I had any driving to do it was all NPR. I knew all of the NPR radio voices; NPR was my constant companion.

I kept a few journals in my tenue at the Transgender Center, and I am able to piece together through those some of the important pieces of information that got me to go public as a whistleblower in February of 2023.

A few of the key factors for me cannot be reproduced. I cannot tweet out the link and suggest you share it with your friends. The most crucial elements came directly from the work itself. Those four elements I will just call “the core.”

The basis, as I understood, for using medical interventions (puberty blockers, cross sex hormones, and surgery) on children and adolescent is that it will make them ‘better.’ That it is a ‘treatment’ for a ‘condition.’ I thought that ‘condition’ was called gender dysphoria. I learned early on that some of the doctors didn’t care if people had this ‘condition,’ that they were willing to ‘treat’ if the patient wanted the ‘treatment’ provided.

It was the patients, the detransitioners, the data and then finally the doctors that were a part of the core in why my thinking changed.

What I want to discuss further are the things that you, too, can read, watch, and listen to. Things that you can share with your friends, your parents with the Biden yard sign, your neighbor who might say something like, “isn’t it so great we live in a country where Rachel Levine has her job.”  

Articles and Podcasts:

1.       April of 2019, a story out of England made its way into some of the media outlets in the United States. It was a few weeks after it first broke that I read the story. The headline was, “Five Staff Resign at Leading UK Transgender Youth Clinic.” This shocked me. When I read why they resigned I was floored and in awe.

2.       Jess Singal’s article, “When Children Say They’re Trans,” published in 2018. I know that I didn’t read this until 2020. This is a balance story, but it defiantly said: hey there might be something here that needs to be considered. 

3.       May 2021, 60 Minutes aired a segment on detransitioners. They were young, they were brave and they could have been pulled directly from the center I worked at.

4.       Endocrine Society’s own guidelines for transgender care, “Endocrine Treatment of Gender-Dysphoric/Gender Incongruent Persons: An Endocrine Society Clinical Practice Guideline.”  I have a practice that I learned in graduate school, when I read a science paper I usually have three color highlighters. I then highlight based on the GRADE system. That is a 4 point system.

a.       Very Low Certainty- Red

b.       Low Certainty- Red

c.       Moderate Certainty- Yellow

d.       High Certainty- Green

My expectation was that these guidelines for children and adolescents that involved irreversible changes (some of which could cause permanent infertility) would result in a paper full of green highlights. I felt shame and terror when I did this simple exercise and found mostly red. I wish that I had done this much earlier in my tenure. But I had trusted the doctors. They acted with such certainty when the guidelines own rating scales only suggested the utmost caution.

5.       November 2021 the Washington Post publishes, “The mental health establishment is failing trans kids” https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/11/24/trans-kids-therapy-psychologist/ by Laura Edwards Leeper and Erica Anderson. The floor fell out from underneath me. This was so critical and on point that the team even had a long fraught email conversation about this article; yet changed nothing in their practices.

6.       It was in 2021 that I also began listening to two podcasts. The first is Gender: A Wider Lens https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/gender-a-wider-lens-podcast/id1542655295 and the second is Transparency https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/transparency/id1583333120.

Gender is hosted by Stella O’Malley and Sasha Ayad. I identified and respected Stella for speaking out about her own childhood dysphoria, something that I also experienced. Transparency is hosted by out transmen Aaron Kimberly and Aaron Terrell. I would listen to a few podcasts over the weekend usually while I was working in the garden and after working all week in the gender center. These podcasts added layers to my understanding of my own work and contextualized this moment in time in relevant history.

7.       March 2022 the Interim Cass Report is released. It is an accessible read, but it also speaks to the work in a way that I felt it was written directly to those inside of these centers. I was like they knew things about what we were really doing. Things that only insiders knew or would talk about.

8.       On April 13, 2022 The New York Times published Ross Douthat’s opinion piece, “How to make Sense of the New L.G.B.T.Q. Culture War.” By this point, I already had clear evidence that at least a portion of the presenting patients were being effected by a social contagion. There were even patients who acknowledge this themselves. I also already had evidence that the interventions were making a significant portion of the patients sicker, mental health was worsening and overall medical ‘health’ was negatively being effected.

Ross then writes: “Within not too short a span of time, not only conservatives but most liberals will recognize that we have been running an experiment on trans-identifying youth without good or certain evidence, inspired by ideological motives rather than scientific rigor, in a way that future generations will regard as a grave medical-political scandal. Which means that if you are a liberal who believes as much already, but you don’t feel comfortable saying it, your silence will eventually become your regret”

It would be just 10 months later that my piece is published in The Free Press. I have never met nor spoken to Ross Douthat. I know very little about him. He should probably know that his words changed my life. I wasn’t just a liberal, I wasn’t just one who already knew that what he was saying was the truth, but I was in essence the one loading the trains.

Books:

I still love books, real books. Paper books that I can dog ear and scribble in. This is a short list, but these are the books that I have on a special shelf. The first three books listed below are on that shelf and that I would take with me in a zombie apocalypse.

1.       Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World  by Tracy Kidder. I think that I have read this 10 times. First published in 2003. My undergraduate degree is in cultural anthropology, my graduate degree in clinical research. This book is about Dr. Paul Farmer, who died in 2022, he was a medical anthropologist and physician. If you want to be inspired, to consider medicine globally and your own place in the world this might be a good book for you.

2.       Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink. Published in 2013. I have the hardback version and it includes a series of ethical reader questions in the back. I have worked in and adjacent to hospital care for at least a decade. If you want to develop your own ethical framework read this book and consider yourself as the hospital staff, flood waters surround you, no power, no water, no rescue seems to be coming and patients are dying and those around you are starting to euthanize patients. Where are your ethical boundaries?

3.       The Spirit Catches you and You Fall Down A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures by Anne Fadiman. Published in 1997. I read this book in my undergraduate years, although I don’t remember it being assigned. Another great medical anthropology read. In the end this is a book about a medical tragedy. A medical tragedy that occurs when spiritual factors, cultural factors and scientific factors collide. This book is part of the framework that reminds me to always question the cultural forces that individual patient’s presentations are always inside of.

4.       The Sleeping Beauties and Other Stories of Mystery Illness by Suzanne O’Sullivan. Published in 2021. This book is amazing. If anyone is struggling with the idea that we might be seeing a culture bound social contagion this book never mentions the word transgender yet explains it all.

5.       Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activist, and one Scholars Search for Justice by Alice Dreger. I wish I found this book so much earlier. This review nails this book, “many liberals, after all, have convinced themselves that its conservatives who attack science in the name of politics, while they would never do such a thing. Galileo’s Middle Finger correct this misperception in a rather jarring fashion, and that’s why it’s one of the most important social-science books” New York Magazine. Also Galileo is one of my favorite Indigo Girls songs and in my current life it has been eliciting tears if I try to listen to it.

I have read a few great books since I left my position in the gender center that I would also recommend.

1.       Sex Science Self: A Social History of Estrogen, Testosterone, and Identity by Bob Ostertag. 2016. I love Bob, every time I get a chance to speak to him I find myself ordering another book he has recommended. The LGBT community should respect its elders and he is one to respect and listen to.

2.       Great and Desperate Cures: The Rise and Decline of Psychosurgery and Other Radical Treatments for Mental Illness by Elliot Valendtein. 2010. History of the lobotomy.

3.       Time to Think: Inside the Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children by Hannah Barnes 2023. Just read it, the first of many like it to come.

So what about you? What essential articles, podcasts, or books that are accessible to the general public would you recommend?

Please add in the comments below!