This morning, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the United States v. Skrmetti. The legal challenge brought by the Biden administration, and supported by more than 160 Democratic lawmakers in their own brief to the court, concerns whether Tennessee’s ban on transgender drugs and surgeries for minors violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Tennessee is among 26 states that have similar bans in place, many of which are being challenged in the courts.
Last year, The Free Press published a groundbreaking account from Jamie Reed, the first public whistleblower from inside a gender clinic in the United States. And the response was explosive. You wouldn’t expect Reed to support these Republican-led bans: She is a lifelong progressive lesbian married to a trans man who has now detransitioned, and describes herself as “to the left of Bernie Sanders.” Yet she is also the executive director of the LGBT Courage Coalition, a movement of lesbians and gay men opposed to pediatric gender transitions.
Today she is speaking outside the Supreme Court about why she hopes the Tennessee law will be upheld. The following piece is adapted from her remarks. —The Editors
Today, just meters away from where I stand, the top legal minds in the country will consider whether there’s a constitutional right to harm children.
How did we get to this point? The medical practice of treating children who are distressed about their gender started out with good intentions. But this case, at its core, represents the profound failures that have occurred in our institutions. Failures that began when activism took over science. Failures that can only be corrected by the courageous, and now the courts. It should never have reached this point, but here we are.
These failures began with the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Endocrine Society. These medical organizations quite suddenly embraced the idea that any child who expressed gender distress must immediately be affirmed and swiftly medicalized.
This then spiraled as risk-management departments and ethics boards at major hospitals grew fearful of raising questions about why there was an explosion of children and teens who wanted this treatment. Not only were these treatments moneymakers for hospitals—it quickly became career-threatening to raise any concerns about this new branch of medicine and the dangers of subjecting young people to lifetime treatments with unknown consequences.
I was once on the front lines, among the proselytizers. Between 2018 and 2022, as a case manager at the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, I worked with gender-dysphoric youth, and I initially thought we were helping patients. I believed our practices were evidence-based. I trusted we were operating under guidelines created from the scientific method. I assumed that the studies that touted these practices were rigorous and conducted within medical research ethical guidelines. We trained the other hospital departments, the schools, and the staff in the local family courts on how to treat children we called trans: Affirm a new identity without regard for biology or the underlying causes of gender distress.
Yet when I pulled back the curtain, I was shocked to learn this “science” wasn’t worthy of the name.