Whistle-Blower Speaks Out at the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital

In November, 2022, Jamie Reed quit her job at the The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital because she came to the conclusion that the way the Center treated its young patients was "morally and medically appalling." Here are the opening paragraphs of her detailed story at The Free Press: "I Thought I Was Saving Trans Kids. Now I’m Blowing the Whistle."

I am a 42-year-old St. Louis native, a queer woman, and politically to the left of Bernie Sanders. My worldview has deeply shaped my career. I have spent my professional life providing counseling to vulnerable populations: children in foster care, sexual minorities, the poor.

For almost four years, I worked at The Washington University School of Medicine Division of Infectious Diseases with teens and young adults who were HIV positive. Many of them were trans or otherwise gender nonconforming, and I could relate: Through childhood and adolescence, I did a lot of gender questioning myself. I’m now married to a transman, and together we are raising my two biological children from a previous marriage and three foster children we hope to adopt.

All that led me to a job in 2018 as a case manager at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital, which had been established a year earlier.

The center’s working assumption was that the earlier you treat kids with gender dysphoria, the more anguish you can prevent later on. This premise was shared by the center’s doctors and therapists. Given their expertise, I assumed that abundant evidence backed this consensus. During the four years I worked at the clinic as a case manager—I was responsible for patient intake and oversight—around a thousand distressed young people came through our doors. The majority of them received hormone prescriptions that can have life-altering consequences—including sterility.

I left the clinic in November of last year because I could no longer participate in what was happening there. By the time I departed, I was certain that the way the American medical system is treating these patients is the opposite of the promise we make to “do no harm.”

Instead, we are permanently harming the vulnerable patients in our care. Today I am speaking out. I am doing so knowing how toxic the public conversation is around this highly contentious issue—and the ways that my testimony might be misused. I am doing so knowing that I am putting myself at serious personal and professional risk.

Almost everyone in my life advised me to keep my head down. But I cannot in good conscience do so. Because what is happening to scores of children is far more important than my comfort. And what is happening to them is morally and medically appalling.

[More . . . .]

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Robert Malone’s Metaphor

Robert Malone:

There are many metaphors and memes circulating which seek to capture the self-evident evil and corruption which all but those blinded by “Mass Formation” and the massive FifthGen Warfare PsyOps campaign which has been deployed upon the entire world over the last three years. Of all of these, the simple binaries of heaven and hell, God and the Devil seem to distill it all down into a black, bilious bitter liquor which has withstood the test of time. Speaking for myself, I am caught between the banal and the profoundly spiritual as I survey this twenty first century information battlescape.

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Seymour Hersh Blows Up Joe Biden’s Nord Stream 2 Pipeline Story

Here's a short chronology, then my reaction:

Feb 7, 2022: Joe Biden promises that Russia invades Ukraine, the Nord Stream 2 Pipeline will not be operational: "We will bring an end to it."

Sept 26, 2022 - The Nordstream 2 pipeline is destroyed.

Sept 28, 2022 - The Washington Post scolds Tucker Carlson for reporting that the U.S. destroyed Russia's pipeline.

Sept 30, 2022 - The White house denies U.S. involvement in destroying the pipeline. Accuses the Russians of lying. Claims that Russia destroyed its own pipeline.

Feb 8, 2023 - Highly respected investigative reporter Seymore Hersh issues news article detailing how the U.S. blew up the Nordstream 2 Pipeline. Title: "How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline: The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now."

Feb 8, 2023 - The White House claims that the article by Hersch, a well-decorated reporter (see comments), is "utterly false and complete fiction."

In a surreal way, it has ceased to become "news" that our political leaders constantly lie to us, even on matters that could dramatically escalate (already high) tensions between the U.S. and Russia, two irresponsible trigger-happy countries, each of which is capable of ruining the entire planet with their over-abundance of nuclear weapons.

You and were not give an opportunity to vote on whether the U.S should engage in such reckless behavior. Congress did not deliberate on whether the U.S. should jump into a proxy war with Russia. You and I were not asked whether the U.S. should destroy a valuable asset of Russia, committing what Russia will undoubtedly consider an act of war.

Witness yet another short-term victory for the Military-Petroleum-Industrial-Complex. We are playing out yet another round of wars of discretion. This should be horrifying to all of us. Why? Here are the ending lines of Hersch's article:

The source had a much more streetwise view of Biden’s decision to sabotage more than 1500 miles of Gazprom pipeline as winter approached. “Well,” he said, speaking of the President, “I gotta admit the guy has a pair of balls. He said he was going to do it, and he did.”

Asked why he thought the Russians failed to respond, he said cynically, “Maybe they want the capability to do the same things the U.S. did.

“It was a beautiful cover story,” he went on. “Behind it was a covert operation that placed experts in the field and equipment that operated on a covert signal.

“The only flaw was the decision to do it.”

At this time, based on my own search of these five websites, not a single word about Hersh's Nordstream 2 reporting at NYT, WaPo, CNN, MSNBC or NPR. The only recent thing I found on MSNBC was this glowing interview of Hersh by David Gura.

Nathan Robinson:

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About Trusting Wikipedia

I just learned about a 2021 article titled "Nobody should trust Wikipedia, says man who invented Wikipedia."

Excerpt:

"Larry Sanger, the man who co-founded Wikipedia, has cautioned that the website can’t always be trusted to give people the truth.

He said it can give a “reliably establishment point of view on pretty much everything.”

“Can you trust it to always give you the truth? Well, it depends on what you think the truth is,” said Mr Sanger, who co-founded Wikipedia in 2001 alongside Jimmy Wales.

He told Lockdown TV that “if only one version of the facts is allowed then that gives a huge incentive to wealthy and powerful people to seize control of things like Wikipedia in order to shore up their power. And they do that.”"

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The Importance of Foundational Principles

From Maya Forstater's article, "On Gender-critical disputes."

Helen Joyce comes up with really good allegories and mental models at the rate of about one a week. But the one that I keep coming back to is one she told me the first time I met her, when I was still scrambling to keep my job at CGD, and trying to understand how it was that my smart and normally convivial colleagues had succumbed to repeating and enforcing irrational, circular nonsense.

1=0

Helen (a mathematician by training) said that pretending that human beings can change sex is like saying 1=0, and that the rules and laws we use for sense-making and decision-making are like a series of interconnected equations. When the 1=0 untruth proliferates through them it breaks things: single-sex becomes mixed-sex, fair becomes unfair, truth becomes lie. It works like kryptonite on safeguards, and causes organisations to operate in direct opposition to their purpose. People who need or want to remain inside those institutions create layers of argument (which may be impenetrable even to themselves) in order to protect the untruth and avoid being cast out.

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