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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34498 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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Is The Washington University Transgender Center whistleblower a troll or a crank?

Last week @PmMeClassicMemes posted about the whistleblower Jaime Reed, and the Missouri Independent's and the St.Louis Post Dispatch investigation into Washington University Transgender Center:

The afffadavit should be sufficient to dismiss Reed as a troll or a crank. Choice quotes, paragraphs 15 & 59:

15. One patient came to the Center identifying as a “communist, attack helicopter, human, female, maybe non binary.”

59. Children come into the clinic using pronouns of inanimate objects like “mushroom,” “rock,” or “helicopter.”

Many journalists as well as state officials took seriously the allegations that children Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter, in a breathtaking display of credulity.

Back when TracingWoodgrains posted about his hoax op against Libs Of TikTok one of the arguments for her credulity, or failure to do due diligence, was that somewhere in the made up documents they sent her was an “obvious” joke. The other argument boiled down to “Haha! How could you believe schools would teach kids about furries?”. Now, as it happens the joke was only obvious if you happened to be terminally online dramanaut, and Poe's Law is a thing, but if there's a group taking credit for a hoax, then yeah, it's safe to assume it was a hoax.

ClassicMemes' criticism follows the same pattern, which is why my original response was “well played”, but the more I thought about it, and the more I looked into it, the less sense it made. For one, for it to hold water, Reed would have to be a pro-trans troll trying to discredit trans-sceptics like Bari Weiss, right? And yet, that's not the approach that was taken, the story is somehow supposed to discredit Weiss, Singal, as well as Reed. Weiss, and Singal should have recognized another “obvious joke”, and Reed is supposed to be a vile transphobe making things up to discredit the clinic, without any regard for believability. Well, no one said she's a smart troll, or like ClassicMemes said, she could also just be a crank. Still, if we're leaning on the existence of cranks to explain the whole story, isn't it weird how it's never considered that a troubled kid might have actually been saying some crazy shit?

Originally I wanted to look into the whole thing myself, but it turns out it's hard to compete with experienced journalists who can do this sort of thing full time, and who's reputations are on the line. Jesse Singal got in touch with Jaime Reed, and asked about the incident. She gave the names of the specific people involved in the incidents, and described it in detail:

Lofquest explained that the patient was reporting that their mental health had worsened since starting hormones. The patient also couldn’t clearly define their gender identity. That prompted Reed to pull up their chart on her computer to try to figure out what was going on. The clinic uses Epic, a popular program for keeping track of patient records. Included in this patient’s Epic chart, in the “Media” tab where additional information can be added, was the letter of support from an outside therapist that had apparently been used to justify the decision to immediately start them on hormones upon their arrival at the clinic.

The patient was quoted in the letter as saying they identified as a “communist, attack helicopter, human, female, maybe non binary.” The therapist also wrote that the patient reported that they “hope for the transition to feel better in my body and no longer just in a flesh box.”

She also sent Jesse her Google Doc with notes about her situation, last modified on Jan 5th, where the attack helicopter incident is mentioned. Now, the doc itself is just her private notes, and at this point she cannot give the actual Epic notes, only recount the incident, so it's not proven, but that's some amount of doubling down. One thing to consider is that of all the people involved, she's currently the only one who has anything to lose by lying. Everyone disagreeing with her claims just gave a few statements to the newspapers, at the moment she's the only one with an affidavit that can get her dinged for perjury. If she's a crank, she's absolutely batshit insane.

Mainstream Media Investigation

On the other hand, there are some questions about the credibility of the Missouri Independent's and the St.Louis Post Dispatch investigations. In another article Jesse Singal writes:

There are far too many allegations in these stories to cover them all, and verifying many of them will require both time and access to the patients and parents in question, their children’s medical records, or both. For now, I simply want to draw attention to two major omissions from the coverage so far: the first has to do with Kim Hutton, who is presented by the Post-Dispatch as a “baffled” parent of a patient at The Washington University Transgender Center who fervently disagrees with Reed’s assessment of the Center’s services; the second has to do with Jess Jones, a former staffer who has been quoted bashing Reed at length and expressing confidence in the quality of care delivered by the clinic.

...

The “baffled” line was compelling enough that it was integrated into the article’s headline. But Colleen Schrappen, the article’s author, doesn’t note that Kim Hutton is the cofounder of TransParent, a group that advocates for trans kids and their access to medical treatment.

...

But in this case, the undisclosed conflicts are even more severe: not only is Hutton the cofounder of TransParent, but she actually helped create the very gender center being scrutinized.

Another issue is that both articles lean heavily on the statements of Jess Jones an ex-coworker of the whistleblower Reed, who quit working in the clinic because Reed was just so toxic, and who "feels like she could go line by line to her affidavit and debunk it all”. Well, it turns out this goes both ways:

Reed vehemently denied just about everything Jones claimed about her here and elsewhere in these articles.

...

At the most basic factual level, Reed told me that it was simply false that Jones chose to resign in 2020, let alone that they did so “primarily” because of Reed herself. Rather, she said, Jones was furloughed in April 2020 as the pandemic spiraled out of control

...

Reed explained that whenever the clinic got a referral from a potential new patient, there was a process in place to make sure the education liaison — Jones, for a period of time — engaged in the necessary follow-up communication to offer the family educational resources, a discussion around any issues they were having with their school or school district, and so forth. Reed said Jones “did not do the necessary follow-up often, or document it,” and that she “was seeing that they were not closing the loop back or documenting in the electronic medical record the work that they were supposed to be doing.” Reed shared a spreadsheet she kept at the time tracking new referrals. The spreadsheet, which has personal information about patients redacted, appears to contain many instances of Jones failing to complete their follow-up duties, as demonstrated in this screenshot of the top of it

There's more and I'm not going to quote the entire article, but I do want to note how Reed's statements are accompanied by screenshots of actual documents, in contrast to the statements given to he Missouri Independent's and the St.Louis Post Dispatch. As a humble contribution from me I'd also like to address this part from the Missouri Independent:

“When [lawmakers] do their job, what happens to the transgender center you used to work at?” Free Press journalist Emily Yoffe asked.

“I do not believe it can continue to function,” said Reed, who is married to a transgender man.

“You want it closed down,” Yoffe inquired.

“I believe it’s the only way to stop hurting more kids,” Reed said.

This is your run-of-the-mill journalistic context-cutting. From this exchange what is the impression you get? That she's ideologically against transition? Here's the relevant exchange from the town hall, and here's a follow up on the statement. She believes that the current view is based on a false picture given by the transgender care providers, and that there needs to be a moratorium, and an investigation to get the whole thing sorted out before transition services for minors can be resumed.

All in all, I'm leaning in the direction of these being coordinated hit-pieces than an actual investigation, but time will tell.

The attack helicopter line always seemed plausible to me because kids say some weird things. The weak part of Reed's account is that she had a tendency to frame what could be very real malpractice by the clinic in maximalist terms that make it easy to 'debunk' by finding single counterexamples

Reed claimed that it was a common tactic to say 'you can have a living daughter or a dead son' then later admitted only one clinician said that. Reed said that patients weren't warned about vaginal tissue atrophy but it's listed on the pamphlet the clinic gives out.

Reed's affidavit claims "nearly all" of the patients have severe mental illness and that the clinic "almost never" allowed her to prescribe psychological care. Then the Missouri Independent finds parents (the Freels not Hutton) who says their child has no mental health issues and pursued social transition and counseling for a year before starting medical transition. So are they the tiny exception to the "almost never" and the clinic has them on speed dial to cover for the rest, or are they typical and Reed is exaggerating the prevalence of a few outlier cases? We don't have statics here for medical privacy reasons.

To return to the salacious attack helicopter bit, originally #15 from the Affidavit says that a patient "came to the center identifying as a communist attack helicopter". Now Reed adds says that was a line from a letter recommending hormones from an outside therapist. The first account makes it seem like people were walking in identifying as attack helicopters and getting prescribed puberty blockers on their first visit when really they had been seeing an outside therapist previously who recommended the treatment. Reed said she didn't know this was a meme and was concerned about that it indicated a lack of clear gender identity. We don't have the letter, we just have that she wrote the attack helicopter line in her Notes app contemporaneously. It's possible the doctor was a hack, it's possible Reed misread a joke, but being overly credulous of the recommendations of outside therapists is pretty different from handing out estrogen to kids coming in identifying as attack helicopters.

American healthcare is individualized and it seems plausible to me that there are doctors out there giving puberty blockers and HRT to kids who don't need them, it's plausible some such doctors worked at this clinic. Reed also doesn't seem like an anti-trans ideologue, but she also wasn't careful about making precise well documented claims.

I'll concede the claims being imprecise, but regarding the documentation, as much as I'd love to see it, what exactly is the legality of raiding the clinic for patients' data?

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