Children’s Trans Clinic Whistleblower Drops Bombshell on Dr. Phil

A children’s gender clinic whistleblower on Thursday claimed to Dr. Phil that she saw regretful patients ask to have their removed body parts restored after operations.

Jamie Reed, who worked at the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, penned a lengthy tell-all exposé last year in which she called gender clinics for kids “morally and medically appalling.” On “Dr. Phil Primetime,” the host asked Reed, who is queer and married to a transgender person herself, what changed her mind about transgender treatments for youth.

“A number of things,” she said. “We started to see patients who were experiencing very significant medical harms being rushed to the emergency room with lacerations requiring stitches. We had patients contact us who were begging to have body parts put back on within months of having surgeries.”

She went on to claim, “The thing that kept happening is every time I would raise concerns and ask about the protocols and ask about the guidelines — this is just how the industry works, if a child says they’re trans there’s no questioning it. We just say, ‘Yep, you’re trans, what would you like?’”

Reed was responsible for patient intake and oversight during her time at the hospital between 2018 and 2022. She said that most young people who walked through the door received hormone prescriptions that can have life-altering consequences, such as sterility.

“You’re telling me that a 12- or 13-year-old, who can’t decide which pajamas to wear, can come in and say, ‘I’ve decided that I want to transition,’ and with no more than a couple of hours or two visits — not even a couple of hours, two visits — they say ‘Okay, start taking this, start doing this,’ which alters their biochemistry in a way that you can’t come back from?” Dr. Phil asked.

“Correct,” Reed affirmed.

Reed said that kids identifying as transgender has become 10 times more common and they are overwhelmingly young teenage women who wish to become men.

Girls, she argued, tend to be very attuned to the trends in their environment, particularly on social media and in their peer groups, to the point where girls in the same class would come in clusters all requesting procedures at the same time.

“They would come in, and they would almost have the exact same storyline, too, like they learned what to say from a video to explain, ‘Oh, no, really, I’ve felt this way from early childhood,’ but a lot of their parents couldn’t remember anything like that,” said Reed.

“There were very few written protocols or guidelines. One of the providers even said ‘we were flying the plane as we built it.’ Doctors are acting like they’re God when it comes to medically transitioning children,” she said.

“I saw a young person who was begging to have their breasts put back on after having surgery. We were encouraged not to make a big deal out of it and definitely not to tell other families. I couldn’t continue to be silent on it,” she added about detransitioners.

After Reed went public last year, multiple prominent figures have called for investigations into the trans clinic.

In February 2023, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey said that his office had launched a multi-agency investigation into the Washington University Pediatric Transgender Center.

In September, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., sent a letter to Washington University in St. Louis and BJC Healthcare demanding an investigation into its protocols for transitioning minors. The center will no longer be giving minors puberty blockers for the purpose of transitioning to another gender, the center announced that month, due to a newly passed state law outlawing gender-changing treatments for minors. The law went into effect Aug. 28, but exempts patients who have already begun transitioning.