"The protocol itself is homophobic"

A Joseph Welch Moment for gender medicine

Every now and then, someone shatters an ideological consensus with a single act of moral courage. The example I always reach for came in the summer of 1954, when attorney Joseph Welch reacted in revulsion to Joe McCarthy essentially doxxing one of his colleagues with the words “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”.

The moment broke not just McCarthy but the spell he had cast over his countrymen. He went from the most feared politician in America to a powerless, disgraced figure in less than six months and his final years were spent in obscurity.

Now, in 2024, we may have just witnessed a similar moment in the fight over gender medicine.

At a hearing for Assembly Bill 104, Jamie Reed—formerly a trainer of Missouri judges and hospital divisions in gender medicine—delivered testimony that could mark a turning point. She wasn’t some outsider. She wasn’t a longtime critic. She was part of the system, a believer, someone who had actively trained others in the practices she was now exposing. And what she revealed was devastating.

A System Built on a Lie

Reed admitted she had once been an “absolute true believer.” She had helped guide hospitals, courts, and institutions to adopt the so-called gender-affirming model of care. But eventually, the cracks became too big to ignore.

The first and most damning revelation was the deep-seated homophobia at the heart of gender medicine. The overwhelming majority of children being fast-tracked into transition weren’t “gender dysphoric” in any historical sense. They were same-sex attracted.

"The first 70 children that were put through this protocol, 68 of them were same-sex attracted. The entire DSM protocol is based on stereotypes about what sexed behavior looks like, and most gays and lesbians in childhood do not fit the mold of what regressive stereotypes look like for sexed behavior."

The so-called progressive movement that claims to support LGBT youth has, in reality, created a system that medicalizes them for failing to conform to gender stereotypes. A feminine boy, a masculine girl—their "treatment" isn’t self-acceptance. It’s lifelong medicalization.

Then there was the lie about puberty blockers.

Parents are constantly reassured that these drugs are “completely reversible.” But Reed described how blocking puberty led to catastrophic surgical complications. One child—whose penis had been stunted by blockers—was unable to undergo the standard vaginoplasty procedure. Instead, surgeons used a section of the child’s colon to construct a neovagina.

"Of the 70 children that were put through this protocol, one of them died because the protocol itself destroyed what used to be the way that we would invert an adult’s penis to make it a vagina. The puberty blocker itself makes the penis not grow, to the point where that child was put through a vaginoplasty that used their colon instead, and they died of a massive infection."

This isn’t a minor medical dispute. This isn’t a policy debate over competing treatment models. This is a scandal. A scandal that is costing children their lives.

An epidemic within an epidemic

Reed also detailed how, in just a few short years, the gender industry exploded. When she first entered the field, her clinic saw around four new cases a month—mostly prepubescent boys. Within a few years, that number had skyrocketed to 50 or 60 cases a month, with 80% of them being teenage girls.

What changed?

"Guess what teenage girls have in common? They are absolutely susceptible to social contagion. This occurred right when COVID lockdowns happened, right when we stuck one of these in all of those teenagers' phones (possibly she meant ‘hands’ here), and right when we saw all of these girls watching videos. We actually refer to it in the clinic as ‘TikTok Tics.’ They literally were parroting and coming into our clinic with the exact same storyline that they learned online about what it meant to be trans."

This is what Reed saw firsthand: teenagers absorbing a script from social media, walking into clinics, and being placed on an irreversible medical pathway with virtually no resistance.

She confirmed what critics of gender medicine have long suspected—the system wasn’t designed to protect vulnerable children. It was designed to funnel them toward transition as quickly as possible.

The Damage is Done

The most gut-wrenching part of Reed’s testimony was the human cost of these interventions.

She described how girls she had referred for surgery suffered severe complications. Some had to undergo emergency surgery after their first sexual experience because their chemically weakened vaginas tore open.

She told the story of a young woman who deeply regretted her mastectomy and begged to have her breasts re-attached.

"We removed the breast of a young woman who called us back begging to have them put on. She not only had detransitioned and was re-identifying as a woman. She was also pregnant, she also grew up in foster care, and she literally told us that part of this identity for her was a social contagion."

It’s hard to overstate the gravity of what Reed was saying. This isn’t just bad medicine. It’s a medical disaster, one that has left thousands of young people permanently altered.

At long last

Reed’s testimony may go down as the moment when the truth became impossible to ignore. I certainly intend to share it whenever I’m told the trans activist catechism of “it’s not happening and it’s good that it’s happening”

For years, medical institutions, activist organizations, and policymakers have dismissed all criticism of these interventions as bigotry. But scandals of this scale tend to have a reckoning. The facts are becoming undeniable, the damage too great to ignore.

Jamie’s willingness to acknowledge her own role in harming her patients is an act of profound integrity and courage. Her testimony stands as a warning to the institutions that continue to endorse a reckless medical experiment rather than face the facts. These institutions can resist accountability for now, but the public is no longer in the dark. Tomorrow always comes, and when it does, there will be nowhere left to hide for the supporters of this poisonous medical McCarthyism.