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Jamie Reed
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Tudor Dixon
Welcome to the Tutor Dixon Podcast. Well, today my guest describes herself as politically left of Bernie Sanders. And that probably has you thinking, that's pretty opposite of me. So what would this podcast be about? Well, we actually agree on something, and that is that kids shouldn't be manipulated by a medical professional, because it turns out that most people around the country actually don't think of this as a political decision. They think of this as just something that should be right for kids, and it's outside of the realm of politics. But Jamie Reed, who is my guest today, is so much braver than me. Jamie is a former caseworker at the Washington University Transgender center, and she actually turned into a whistleblower on pediatric gender care. I wanted to talk to Jamie in light of what we've seen out of this New York State, New York State case that just awarded $2 million to a D transitioner who had her breast removed at 16. She is now 21, and she has received this award of $2 million. And I think that a lot of us had been watching this and said, we don't really know what's happening in the transgender world. But, Jamie, you came out and talked about it, even though you got some pretty heavy pushback on not talking about it. I did.
Jamie Reed
I became a whistleblower in 2023, almost three years ago to the date. And this case both doesn't shock me at all, but also really saddens me in that we are now at the point where I believe there's going to be hundreds, if not thousands of more cases very similar to hers.
Tudor Dixon
So what do you think happens now? We saw that in the UK they kind of backed away from surgeries. Now, I think even our own PL surgery association has said, you know what, Maybe this is better for people who are over 19 years old. What do you think this means for doctors who performed these surgeries on young kids?
Jamie Reed
So a couple things. Yes. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons announced within the same week of this ruling that they have changed their recommendations that no longer under the age of 19, should there be surgeries performed in regards to gender. I'll say that I don't know that they said that it's good for people over the age of 19, but simply that they don't have enough evidence. There's no good quality evidence to do this on kids. What I also think is that this doesn't mean that they have walked back or said the surgeries that might have been performed they're absolutely opposed to. But what I think it tells us is that we are now seeing a shift in the societies who used to agree with this are now publicly coming out and saying, no longer do they do. So that's a huge change. This is a huge change for one of the American medical societies to do this. But they should have done it years ago. The evidence to support this wasn't there years ago. And really, this is demonstrating that sometimes our American groups of doctors wait until they have to, to do the right thing. So I really think that they should have come to these conclusions years ago. Not waiting until we see lawsuits and not waiting until the international consensus is completely collapsing.
Tudor Dixon
It was kind of hidden, though. It was like, this is a rare thing. There's certain times when these kids end up in this situation and, you know, it's just like any other anomaly. You know, this kid was born in the wrong body, and there's not really these surgeries going on. This is incredibly rare. So I think that for some of us who thought maybe it's not as rare or maybe it's too soon, or how does a child, you know, we started hearing about kids that are 4 years old that or, oh, they have to be transitioned. We're going, how do they actually know? Is this really. Is there really science behind this? But a lot of us were told, it's none of your business. It's not that common. How did you. What did you see at the gender clinic? What did you see that made you go, this is not okay?
Jamie Reed
So you're absolutely right. I think for a long time a lot of just normal Americans thought, this doesn't line up. But we were definitely being told, oh, no, the doctors got this. You know, the science backs this up. What I saw directly in the gender center was that the evidence was not clear, but also that we were harming our patients. And so what I was seeing was patients that I was being told and their families were being told, start on this medical pathway. Puberty blockers, cross sex hormones, and sometimes surgery in minors. And this would treat these kids. They would make their mental health better, it would make them less suicidal, it would help them align with whatever their internal gender was. It just didn't work. I just simply saw patients who were not getting better, they were getting worse. But I also saw a lot of families who were being completely torn apart. Dads who didn't agree and didn't want their kids put on these treatments, moms who would then go divorce dads and fight in custody battles over doing these things. It was basically just devastating what I was participating in doing to families and kids. And then the longer I was there, we started getting patients coming back to us and saying, this was not right for me. You hurt me. You should not have put me on this. A lot of those individuals call themselves detransitioners, but we saw them popping back up in clinic, or they would just disappear and would. We would try to see where did they go? Why didn't they come for their follow up? Um, we were learning that they had felt like we had harmed them, and that's not proper medicine. We were not following good medical ethics.
Tudor Dixon
Do you think that you talked about the puberty blockers, but also the surgeries? The puberty blockers I always found interesting because this isn't changing your gender. It's stopping you from having your body grow. I mean, these are changes everybody's body goes through. But it's not just changes for gender. It actually does a lot to strengthen your bones, to change your hormones, to make you stronger, to make you larger, to have a lot of your growth and even your mental growth has to do with your body going through puberty. Do you think that those were also, I mean, almost, I have to say, experimental at this point?
Jamie Reed
They absolutely were. When they started being used in the United States, they were based on a very small number of studies that were completed in Europe. It jumped over to the US and we rolled this out as what it was called the standard of care. We acted like it had come clean through experimental trials and it had great evidence behind it and that it had been replicated and that it was safe to do in the vast majority of patients. That was not true. This is a real medical research, medical ethics scandal that happened within our lifetime. Puberty blockers are blocking normal human development. We now understand that puberty blocking in the way that is used for gender, career, not only has those risks of harm for bone, for health, but it also simply doesn't really work. It doesn't decrease the distress around whatever gender is that we were told that this was treating that. When we say there's no good evidence, what we're saying is that the experiment was if we give this to somebody who's experiencing distress around their body, then that distress will go away. And there simply is no good quality evidence to show that that hypothesis is even holding true. And we're hurting people in the process by giving them these experimental drugs.
Tudor Dixon
What do you See what was the outcome when you say we were hurting people, what were people coming back and saying?
Jamie Reed
So one of the biggest premises behind this is we were going to help your mental health. And some of the cases that I really struggled with seeing was we would have a child who was on maybe one anti anxiety medication, still going to school, having some anxiety or depression, but still basically functioning. And then we put them on a puberty blocker and I saw that exact same patient now on five psychotropic medications. I had one patient then go from sometimes having suicidal thoughts to the parent calling me that they were on the roof of the house threatening to jump off. This is not showing benefit. It was harm. I also had patients who physically were harmed. These are not good treatments on the body. We take a body that's physically healthy and we put it into a hormonal state of being dysregulated. We saw patients whose blood chemistries got worse, who were developing pre diabetes, who were becoming obese, who were having a lot of medical complications based on something we were telling them was somehow treating this, you know, mental health distress within the body. That in all, you know, it really doesn't exist. You can't be born in the wrong body. It just, it's not even a real medical concept.
Tudor Dixon
When you said, you said something at the beginning, I want to go back to that because you said they're coming out and they're saying that they don't know that this is, or that they haven't said that this is unhealthy for people under 19, but they haven't said it's healthy for people over either. You made a point that they haven't said that this is a good idea to do no matter what. We've actually heard some really horrible, horrible stories about trans, trans women. I'm trying to make sure I get the, this right. They, they have had their genitals cut off and they. So they went from having a penis to having a vagina and that having some really terrible lifelong consequences. And honestly when you read those stories and they're not, they're not few, it's not unusual, it's like a very challenging thing to get right. It seems like it because it's not supposed to work that way. These people deal with a situation the rest of their life that would make you want to kill yourself. I mean, these are really horrible side effects. What do you think about this for older people?
Jamie Reed
It's an excellent question. Right now most of the conversation in the United States is around stopping this in children so right now about half of our states have bans so that kids are not put on puberty blockers, cross sex hormones or surgeries. But half of our states are still allowing this for children. Right now I am intensely focused on making sure this doesn't happen to kids, but exactly what you said. There is actually not a lot of quality evidence that this helps adults either and those surgeries have some of the highest complication rates known in surgery. Upwards of 70% of surgeries on individuals genitals for this will go wrong and have major complications that need lifelong revisions. We don't support this in any age, but it becomes really tricky when we talk about do adults have autonomy over their body? Do they have the right to harm their own body and do we have a system in place where we are collectively paying for that through pooled insurance, through Medicaid or Medicare? Do we regulate doctors? These become really tricky ethical questions in adults that right now we are intensely focused on the kids and I think we will see this conversation evolve into the medical ethics for adults.
Tudor Dixon
Let's take a quick commercial break. We'll continue next on the Tudor Dixon Podcast.
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Tudor Dixon
I think for the kids you really say, especially as a parent, when you raise your own children, you go, my gosh, my kids go through so many different phases. And it's funny because my 12 year old said to me, probably, I don't know, six months ago, she was like, man, I am really starting to, she's always been kind of the tomboy of the family. She's like, I'm really starting to like dresses and be interested in makeup and I feel like my, I'm really, my personality is really changing. And I thought, you know, we do, we do. And that's actually part of going through puberty, which is horrible for all of us. I mean, legitimately, that is one conversation I don't know why we don't have with some of these kids. It's like, yeah, this is, it sucks.
Jamie Reed
Yeah, puberty is a challenge, but it's also a rite of passage. It's how we learn to be resilient. It's how we learn to understand ourselves better too. Going through something challenging and difficult is part of what makes us human, but it also makes us stronger. And one of the things that I've asked a number of people who, you know, fall on the opposite side of this as me, is do children ever change their mind? And if we can recognize that children change their mind, then we should not be putting children through irreversible changes to their body that will affect their bodies for their lifetime, affect their fertility. We're taking things away from kids that they don't even understand what they're losing.
Tudor Dixon
Well, that's the other thing I think. I mean, honestly, we are going through a conversation like this right now with one of my kids about. She's, she is unusually tiny. And so there's like, okay, we can do a test to see if she needs growth hormone, and what does that look like? And there's this, you know, there's a dis. A discussion in my own head that's like, she doesn't want to do this test because it sucks. You know, it hurts. It's painful. I don't want to do the test, but I'm like, she's also 12. She doesn't understand that she could be really tiny the rest of her life and struggle because of that. And I'm the adult. I know what the rest of her like. I know she's going to get older and have these challenges, and this is now my responsibility. But in the state of Michigan, it's also not my responsibility because I've. Parental consent is taken out of my hands at 12. You know, now, obviously, at home, we have this discussion, but she. Her medical records and her medical choices are up to her at the age of 12, which seems insane to me, because if. What if we don't go through, like, this is just a test and we're going to do this and we're going to get it done, she would automatically make the decision not to because she doesn't see. She can't see. Her frontal cortex is not fully formed yet. She can't understand the consequences of that. You know, and I think about that situation as compared to a parent who's going to say, you're going to have a different voice. You're.
Jamie Reed
You're.
Tudor Dixon
The way your body is going to form is going to be different. I mean, these boys that go on estrogen, and you talk about obesity and you talk about diabetes, and you can see, because it's. Their shape is different on that, and a woman's shape is softer, but our bodies are built for that. I mean, it's like without a medical degree, you can see it, and you think, this is. This can't be okay.
Jamie Reed
You just also touched on a point that I find really important for everyone. Even if you have no one in your family that's ever questioned their gender, we have seen an erosion of parental rights in medical care. So in states, I think it started first at, you know, coming down to 16, and we were saying girls could consent to birth control on their own or could consent to things down to 12 on their own. But I hear from parents all over the country who can't even get into their children's medical records anymore because they have set it up so that the medical records are locked out when they become an adolescent. You can't even get into epic, you can't even get into the systems to see what's going on for your kids. So it's interesting that trans for a lot of people seems like, oh, and it's an issue. It affects a small group of people. But it's because of this intersection where trans is also pushed on things like parental rights. It's pushed on consent. A lot of the states that we are still fighting to make sure that they're not putting kids on puberty blockers, cross sex hormones, or surgery anymore have lowered the age of consent down to 16 or 14 in some states that kids can go on irreversible changes on their own. So what I continue to remind people is that trans might affect a small group of people, but the parental rights aspect affects every single parent in this country. And it's something that everybody needs to be paying attention to. Even if you only have a toddler right now, we need to be paying attention to what has happened for us in taking care of our own adolescents. I have two teens. I know exactly what you're talking about with those medical records.
Tudor Dixon
So you, you said the word irreversible, which I find interesting because we, we were told it's reversible.
Jamie Reed
We were told that puberty blockers were reversible. And scientifically, if you're on it for a short period of time, a lot of it is we simply don't know. We didn't do the studies ahead of time. We don't know how it affects brain development. But what we do know is that kids that are put on puberty blockers 98% of the time will go on to cross sex hormones. It is not shown to be a time to think or pause. It really has simply shown. It's basically, once you're on that, it's like getting on a highway. Once you cross that threshold and you're on the puberty blocker, you're on the highway with no exit ramp. It's very hard to get back off of this pathway once kids are put on it.
Tudor Dixon
And obviously the surgeries, they say, well, I mean, some of those surgeries are definitely not reversible. And I've heard people say, well, you know, if you decided to change your mind, you can get breast implants. And I find it interesting because I'm a, I had a double mastectomy myself as a cancer survivor. And it's also interesting because they don't, they don't even tell you everything that's going to happen to you when you have that surgery. When you have cancer, you know, they tell you we're going to cut through your nerves. You may get some feeling back. There's going to be areas you won't get feeling back. There's going to be things that you. That'll be different and you're going to look different. You're going to have scars, and it's all going to change. But when you have cancer, you're like, okay, that's the alternative to death, you know, so I'll take that. But then I was reading about these patients that have had this done, that are transgender patients that have had this done, that they've had the double mastectomy. And they were talking about these zaps, and it struck me. I'm like, oh, I do have that. There's a section in my back that regularly feels. I don't know how to describe it. It's like pins and needles, but burning more and. And it. I mean regularly. I can tell you, probably four times a week I sit in the car and I can feel as the back of the seat of the car touches my back, it's like, like someone scratching the. My. I don't know how to describe it. It's a. It's an awful nails on the chalkboard type feeling, which I know the alternative for me, but it breaks my heart to think of these kids that did this not knowing that they could have breastfed their children. They could have, you know, this wasn't necessary.
Jamie Reed
Yep, you're absolutely right. It wasn't medically necessary. And what I find so powerful in your own story is that we as adults can recognize when something truly is life or death, when we don't have a choice about having to move forward with something like that. I think, and I hope that it at least grounds you when you're having that sensation, when you're having those long term, you know, side effects. I think as an adult, we can process that and say, I go through this because I know this is what saved my life. But it's so hard to imagine that a 16 year old would be going through things like that for what was essentially that her and her mom were lied to, that she was going to commit suicide if she didn't do this. And that's just simply not the truth. And I'm so grateful that she won the award that she did. She received $2 million, 400,000 of that they said was for future, for future things, for future follow up, like the things that you experience. But I don't know that we should have ever done this, and I don't know that you can put a price tag on what we did to this young woman.
Tudor Dixon
So what do you think, doctors. Were there ever doctors in your clinic that were starting to question it?
Jamie Reed
Myself, I became, in essence, a squeaky wheel. I started, you know, just saying, this doesn't. This isn't lining up. This isn't lining up. I will say that in my own center, myself and the nurse had a lot of conversations where we found ourselves in agreement that this. We were questioning a lot together. There were moments when our child's psychiatrist also would say, you know, this case doesn't feel right, or this is something that's questionable. The challenge is that so many of the doctors that are doing this, they're doing this because they are part of a belief system, and it's very hard to change your belief structure, especially when it's tied into things. And I know you said at the beginning, this is not about politics. This is not about those things. But. But for me, I really did have to go against all of those things that I thought I. I, you know, was a part of my. My sense of self, that I was a liberal, that I'm a lesbian, that this is, you know, part of my community. I had to go against all of those things in order to do the right thing. And I simply don't know that that's something that everybody is going to be able to muster the ability to do that.
Tudor Dixon
Let's take a quick commercial break. We'll continue next on the Tutor Dixon Podcast. In the medical field, if you are a doctor and you have to be able to rationalize and see that there are plenty of people coming back now and saying that this isn't right. And as a doctor, I mean, you have to kind of know that you're experimenting, don't you? Or are you just so into that mindset of this is going to help?
Jamie Reed
I did once challenge one of the physicians that I worked with, and I said, listen, you know, I feel like we're hurting these patients. And the response was, I know, but what do you want me to do? About. Had almost become that. It was such like a. We had become such a machine where the patient comes in. This is the pathway. This is what you do. I think that that doctor couldn't even recognize a way that we could stop or pause without shutting down the whole mechanism itself. And that's why I came to believe in bans, that nobody should be put through this. But, yeah, these doctors have a lot. We have a whole medical system who's going to have a lot of ethical fallout from this. Not only the doctors, where were the hospital administrators, where was the legal department, where was the ethics department? Why did it take me in one of the, you know, in essence, you know, I was on the multidisciplinary team, but I was one of the lower ranked members on that team. Why did it fall on me to blow the whistle? There were people, and there still are people who are in much higher places of position. I'm waiting for the American Academy of Pediatrics. The director of the American Academy Pediatrics, I believe right now should be one of the bravest people and step forward and say, you're right, the evidence doesn't support this. And we're going to acknowledge that we did something wrong. The Democratic Party, we did something wrong. It's time to be the grownups and acknowledge that.
Tudor Dixon
Well, it is interesting because I noticed that when it started to become a political issue where people. Because once it's a political issue, then people start pulling on it, right? And they start talking to people and they go, oh, actually, the country is not with us on this one. And then we actually had hospital systems in Michigan that just shut down their gender clinics and they, and they kind of did it quietly. It was under the radar and just. It was shut down. And then there were some people who I think were true believers, you know, that came out and like, how could they shut this down? And they wouldn't even acknowledge it. They wouldn't even talk about it. It made me think there's something that they know. And at that point I thought they must have had enough people come back that they do see lawsuits in the future. So I'll just end on this. This is obviously a big deal that the law and that the judge in this case said, we're going to find for the woman who was harmed. That is a big deal that sets a precedent. Do you think that there are going to be a. Not just more extreme cases that we see through this, but do you think that there's going to be doctors who are just going to go, oh my gosh, I can't do this anymore. I can't. I can't have this kind of financial disaster hanging over my head?
Jamie Reed
Yes. So I do believe we're going to see more lawsuits. There are about 25 already filed. I hope that we will see more doctors who say something publicly. But what I think is probably most likely going to happen is that most people who participated in this are going to quietly walk away. They're going to pretend like, they never took part. A whole swath of our country is going to act like they were never in support of this, and they're going to quietly try to memory hole that. And what I feel like we can't do is we can't do that to these kids and families. We have to.
Tudor Dixon
That's what I was just gonna say.
Jamie Reed
These poor kids, we have to at least acknowledge that this occurred and not make it so. Not only did we harm them, but to harm them on the back end too and pretend like it never happened is almost worse.
Tudor Dixon
Gosh, I would not have thought about it until you said it that way. I'm like, there's a whole generation of kids and too many of them had this happen, and then they're just left out there. It's like, it really is like experimentation.
Jamie Reed
Yeah. On children.
Tudor Dixon
We'Re so grateful to you for what you did, for standing up for these kids. Like I said, as a parent, every medical decision is hard. And you have this innate trust for your physician. That's the thing that also I cannot stand about this is because especially having gone through a medical event myself, it's like, you don't know this. I didn't study this. I don't know what is happening inside of my biology and what my body is doing and what's wrong with me. I have to trust the person who is the expert. And so many parents are now going to go, I was misled, but I had no choice. That's who I trusted and I believed in them. And without you, I don't know where we would be. So, Jamie Reed, thank you so much for doing this and thank you for coming on the podcast today.
Jamie Reed
Thank you so much for having me.
Tudor Dixon
Absolutely. And thank you all for joining the Tutor Dixon podcast. You know, you can find the podcast wherever you get podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or you can watch it on rumble or YouTube, uterdixon. But make sure you join us. Thank you for listening and have a blessed day.
Jamie Reed
This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.
Podcast Summary: The Tudor Dixon Podcast: Whistleblower EXPOSES Pediatric Gender Care Risks
Episode Date: February 9, 2026
Guest: Jamie Reed (Former Caseworker, Washington University Transgender Center)
Host: Tudor Dixon
In this episode, Tudor Dixon interviews Jamie Reed, a former caseworker and whistleblower from the Washington University Transgender Center. Despite describing herself as “left of Bernie Sanders,” Reed recounts her experiences and concerns regarding pediatric gender care, highlighting ethical, medical, and parental rights issues. The discussion centers around medical risks, long-term impacts on youth, lack of scientific evidence, and the recent $2 million legal award to a detransitioner, set against the broader context of shifting professional and public attitudes about gender-affirming treatment for children.
"I became a whistleblower in 2023, almost three years ago to the date...We are now at the point where I believe there's going to be hundreds, if not thousands of more cases very similar to [the NY detransition suit]."
— Jamie Reed (03:54)
"This is a huge change for one of the American medical societies to do this. But they should have done it years ago. The evidence to support this wasn't there years ago."
— Jamie Reed (05:08)
"What I saw directly in the gender center was that the evidence was not clear, but also that we were harming our patients... This would treat these kids, make their mental health better, make them less suicidal... It just didn't work."
— Jamie Reed (07:04)
"This is a real medical research, medical ethics scandal that happened within our lifetime. Puberty blockers are blocking normal human development. We now understand... that it also simply doesn't really work."
— Jamie Reed (09:42)
"We take a body that's physically healthy and we put it into a hormonal state of being dysregulated."
— Jamie Reed (11:23)
"We've seen an erosion of parental rights in medical care... Even if you only have a toddler, we need to be paying attention to what has happened for us in taking care of our own adolescents."
— Jamie Reed (21:16)
"Once you're on that, it's like getting on a highway. Once you cross that threshold and you're on the puberty blocker, you're on the highway with no exit ramp."
— Jamie Reed (23:05)
"I became, in essence, a squeaky wheel. I started, you know, just saying, this doesn't... This isn't lining up."
— Jamie Reed (26:52)
"Most people who participated in this are going to quietly walk away... A whole swath of our country is going to act like they were never in support of this, and they're going to quietly try to memory hole that."
— Jamie Reed (31:34)
On medical societies’ shift:
"The evidence to support this wasn’t there years ago… Sometimes our American groups of doctors wait until they have to, to do the right thing."
— Jamie Reed (05:08)
On real-world clinical outcomes:
“I just simply saw patients who were not getting better, they were getting worse. But I also saw a lot of families who were being completely torn apart… It was basically just devastating what I was participating in doing to families and kids.”
— Jamie Reed (07:31)
On puberty as a rite of passage:
“Puberty is a challenge, but it's also a rite of passage. It's how we learn to be resilient… If we can recognize that children change their mind, then we should not be putting children through irreversible changes to their body.”
— Jamie Reed (18:35)
On irreversibility and the lack of long-term data:
"It really has simply shown… Once you're on that, it's like getting on a highway. Once you cross that threshold and you're on the puberty blocker, you're on the highway with no exit ramp."
— Jamie Reed (23:05)
On institutional responsibility:
"Where were the hospital administrators, where was the legal department, where was the ethics department? Why did it take me... to blow the whistle?"
— Jamie Reed (28:40)
On the risk of erasing history:
"A whole swath of our country is going to act like they were never in support of this, and they're going to quietly try to memory hole that. And what I feel like we can't do is… not make it so. Not only did we harm them, but to harm them on the back end too and pretend like it never happened is almost worse."
— Jamie Reed (31:34)
The discussion is forthright, sometimes somber, but threaded with a tone of determined advocacy for transparency, ethical medicine, and parental involvement. Both host and guest express empathy for affected families and call for systemic change and open acknowledgment of past errors.
“These poor kids, we have to at least acknowledge that this occurred and not make it so. Not only did we harm them, but to harm them on the back end too and pretend like it never happened is almost worse.”
— Jamie Reed (32:12)
For listeners unfamiliar with the topic, this episode offers a disturbing but vital look at the complexities and controversies surrounding pediatric gender medicine, ethics, and parental rights in the U.S. healthcare system.