There is some gruesome news out of Missouri about a so-called "transgender" clinic that has allegedly harmed as many as 600 children who had the misfortune of living in an era when too many doctors are quacks and too many grown-ups are not willing to protect children from harm:
A St. Louis transgender treatment clinic is under investigation for allegedly harming up to 600 children, after a whistleblower said doctors bullied parents into giving their kids irreversible hormone drugs, and even performed gender-transitioning surgeries on them.
Jamie Reed, a former employee at the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital, alleged the hospital administered a litany of irreparable treatments to minors, often times without parental consent.
Speaking about her claims Thursday night, Reed said doctors would use questions like 'do you want a dead daughter or an alive son?' to 'bully' parents of children into going ahead with gender transitions - so that their kids wouldn't be suicidal.
Reed said: 'It was like I was in a cult, and I had to de-program my way out of it.'
Reed's original op-ed, featured in the Free Press , offers a behind-the-scenes look at how many doctors have simply rejected both science and the ethical framework of their own profession in order to board the transgender bandwagon.
Frequently, our patients declared they had disorders that no one believed they had. We had patients who said they had Tourette syndrome (but they didn’t); that they had tic disorders (but they didn’t); that they had multiple personalities (but they didn’t).
The doctors privately recognized these false self-diagnoses as a manifestation of social contagion. They even acknowledged that suicide has an element of social contagion. But when I said the clusters of girls streaming into our service looked as if their gender issues might be a manifestation of social contagion, the doctors said gender identity reflected something innate.
To begin transitioning, the girls needed a letter of support from a therapist—usually one we recommended—who they had to see only once or twice for the green light. To make it more efficient for the therapists, we offered them a template for how to write a letter in support of transition. The next stop was a single visit to the endocrinologist for a testosterone prescription.
That’s all it took.
It gets a lot worse than that — really, Reed's piece is quite disturbing . This is a branch of medicine, if you can even call it that, where there are no ethics, there are no rules, and there is no genuine concern for minor patients' well-being. You need to read it, though, because a lot of disturbing things are going on in our country right now.
Missouri, like all other states, must ban such procedures on children and investigate any quack doctor involved in performing them. Doctors used to endorse lobotomies — this is not much different. Any doctor who thinks this is okay to do to a child should have his or her medical license revoked.
And even that's not enough. To make sure this never happens again, and to make sure there is an enormous risk to child mutilators both outside and inside of Missouri who touch children from the Show-Me State, the state legislature must take measures to make it as easy as possible to sue any doctor and any hospital that mutilates children in this way. Make sure that punitive damages are on the table and that as many people as possible — for example, either parent, even if the other parent approves of this sort of thing — have the standing to sue.
The hospitals and doctors are poisoning and mutilating children like this only because it is lucrative — because once you do this, you have a life-long paying patient. Make sure, then, that this is a career-ending surgery to perform, and that it is extremely expensive for the doctor and hospital or clinic involved. That is how this form of child abuse will ultimately stop.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM RESTORING AMERICA