(LifeSiteNews) — Amid the battle over Missouri’s new law restricting transgender procedures for minors, the American civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has targeted Jamie Reed, the whistleblower who first shone a bright spotlight on the appalling so-called “gender transitioning” hormonal and surgical interventions at the children’s hospital where she worked.
The ACLU – a leftist legal organization which once served to protect the civil liberties of whistleblowers like Reed – has subpoenaed all communications between Reed and a host of entities as part of the ACLU’s attempt to undo the Missouri law protecting gender dysphoric kids from grave transgender industry harm.
“I am disappointed that the ACLU, an organization that historically has been devoted to the protection of whistleblowers like Jamie Reed, is now doing the very thing it has always stood against,” Reed attorney Ernie Trakas told National Review. “If the ACLU will not stand up for whistleblowers, who will?”
Reed published a photo on X (formerly Twitter) of the extensive list of organizations with whom she may have communicated concerning “gender-affirming care” to which the ACLU wants access. “Honestly, it’s all an overreach,” said Reed.
Most of the organizations on the ACLU’s list – such as the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Heritage Foundation, and the Family Research Council – are considered to be “conservative,” but not all.
While the left has long tried to cast the issue of “gender-affirming” chemical and surgical interventions for minors as a conservatives versus progressive battle, the fact is that there are even many who identify as being members of the political “left” or “far-left” who question and/or oppose these procedures for children, including Reed herself.
Reed identifies as “queer woman, and politically to the left of Bernie Sanders.” She’s also “married to a transman,” a woman who identifies as a man, with whom she is raising her two biological and three foster children. She is the founder of the “LGBT Courage Coalition,” an activist organization described as “Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender[-identifying] adults who are concerned with the current state of gender medicine for children & the silencing of diverse viewpoints.”
In a follow up, Reed flipped the script on the ACLU, suggesting that the mostly woke neo-Marxist organizations that unwaveringly promote transgender procedures for minors should – if they are truly interested in the welfare of children – change their stance:
The list of organizations that SHOULD be concerned with pediatric gender medicine and working to stop the train wreck:
A. ACLU
B. HRC
C. GLAAD
D. GLSEN
E. GLMA
F. Lambda Legal
G. PFLAG
H. Amnesty International— Jamie Reed Whistleblower (@JamieWhistle) March 10, 2024
Reed later explained, “Being able to identify friend from foe becomes so simple when your goals are clearly defined from the start.”
“My goal is to end pediatric gender medicine,” she declared. “To stop puberty blockers, cross sex hormones, and surgery in minors and to reestablish safeguards that previously existed for adults.”
The Missouri law banning transgender interventions for children came after Reed, a former caseworker at the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, said she left her job in late 2022 because she could no longer support what the center was doing to gender-confused minors.
Reed signed a sworn affidavit affirming her claims and has since spoken out forcefully against the “morally and medically appalling” interventions that cause permanent physical and psychological damage to children, most of them girls.
Based on her experiences and her convictions, Reed called for “a moratorium” on hormone and surgical intervention of young people who suffer gender dysphoria.
Reed explained that it was extremely easy for a gender-confused girl to get started on a regimen of hormone drugs, requiring only “a letter of support” from her therapist. She said the transgender center had even crafted a template to help therapists sign off on their patients’ life-altering decision.
“When parents suggested that they wanted only therapy treatment, not cross-sex hormones or puberty blockers, doctors treated those parents as if the parents were abusive, uneducated, and willing to harm their own children,” noted Reed. “These assertions about abuse and suicide were used as tools to stop parents from asking questions and to pressure parents into consenting.”
“The Center has a team culture of supporting the affirming parent and maligning the non-affirming parent,” she added.
While patients were advised “about some side effects, including sterility,” Reed said she “came to believe that teenagers are simply not capable of fully grasping what it means to make the decision to become infertile while still a minor.”
According to Reed’s sworn affidavit, “In just a two-year period from 2020 to 2022, the Center initiated medical transition for more than 600 children. About 74% of these children were assigned female at birth [girls].”
Gender-confused teenage girls caught up in a harmful social contagion weren’t the only ones showing up to the gender facility to begin a permanently destructive medical journey, according to Reed’s article.
She said young people with serious mental illnesses like bipolar disorder, PTSD, and schizophrenia were also referred to the clinic from the inpatient psychiatric unit of St. Louis Children’s Hospital.
“Often they were already on a fistful of pharmaceuticals,” she said. “Some weeks it felt as though almost our entire caseload was nothing but disturbed young people.”
While the young people arrived with backgrounds filled with trauma, abuse, neglect, and pharmaceutical prescriptions, “our doctors viewed gender transition — even with all the expense and hardship it entailed — as the solution.”
“Almost everyone in my life advised me to keep my head down,” Reed said last year. “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.”