Earlier this week, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, speaking from the House floor, denied that Boston Children’s Hospital’s “gender affirmation” program was giving drugs to children and surgery to teens. Content from the hospital’s own website, however, had a different tale to tell. Now, in another blow to the leftist contention that nothing is being done to so-called transgender children, Jamie Reed, who worked for years at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital, asserts that everything conservatives have been warning about when it comes to “gender-affirming” care for children is true.

What’s really going to put AOC’s and others’ knickers in a twist is that Reed starts by identifying herself. She’s not a Project Veritas employee who snuck in undercover with an agenda. Instead, she’s truly one of them—only she has a conscience and genuinely cares about children’s well-being. Thus, Reed opens her bombshell essay with this:

I am a 42-year-old St. Louis native, a queer woman, and politically to the left of Bernie Sanders. [snip] Through childhood and adolescence, I did a lot of gender questioning myself. I’m now married to a transman, and together we are raising my two biological children from a previous marriage and three foster children we hope to adopt.

It was this life journey that shaped Reed. She explains,

I have spent my professional life providing counseling to vulnerable populations: children in foster care, sexual minorities, the poor.

For almost four years, I worked at The Washington University School of Medicine Division of Infectious Diseases with teens and young adults who were HIV positive. Many of them were trans or otherwise gender nonconforming, and I could relate….

Because Reed cares about children, she decided she could no longer stay silent about what she saw happening at the St. Louis Children’s Hospital in the name of “gender affirming” care. Of course, these are only her untested allegations, so they are not proof. However, to the extent they confirm what those opposing transgender madness have worried about, Reed’s contentions deserve to be fully investigated.

Image: Gender gibberish from a St. Louis Children’s Hospital physician. YouTube screen grab.

I’m not going to include long block quotes here because I think you need to read the entire essay on your own. Reed provides chapter and verse (including redacted emails) supporting allegations that track closely with everything you’ve heard or read from those opposing the left’s push in schools and the media to (1) make children believe they are “transgender” and then (2) push them into permanently altering their bodies. Instead, here are the bullet point versions of Reed’s assertions:

• The operating principle was to “treat” children as young as possible.
• There are no formal protocols guiding treatment; it’s all seat-of-the-pants stuff.
• The number of girls identifying as “transgender” has increased exponentially since 2015.
• If you questioned a girl’s commitment to her new identity, staff identified you as a transphobe.
• The girls all had comorbidities: “depression, anxiety, ADHD, eating disorders, obesity. Many were diagnosed with autism, or had autism-like symptoms.”
• The girls claimed imaginary disorders (e.g., Tourette’s, multiple personalities) that clearly resulted from social contagion.
• To start testosterone treatment, girls needed a letter of support from a therapist, who filled out a form from the clinic after one or two sessions, along with a single visit to an endocrinologist.
• Testosterone permanently alters a female body (deep voice, facial hair, hypersexuality, aggression) and can lead to permanent sterility, diabetes, and high blood pressure and cholesterol. “I 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.”
• Girls’ vaginal walls were so thinned by testosterone that they ripped during intercourse, causing major hemorrhaging.
• Girls also ended up with mutated and painful clitorises.
• Reed repeatedly faced the fact that the teens she was seeing had no concept of the long-term effects of any treatments.
• The clinic brushed off concerns about the teens’ lack of foresight by saying that they were all being saved from suicide.
• Many of the children damaged by hormones ended up on myriad anti-depressants.
• The clinic did a lot of work with children who entered with profound mental disorders (schizophrenia, bipolar, etc.) and were already heavily medicated. The staff believed that “gender transition” was the answer.
• In fraught custody cases, the staff (with the reputation of the institution behind them) would testify for the parent who wanted to turn little children into the opposite sex—and the judges agreed.
• Doctors were disinterested in information about young people who refused gender “treatment” or, having gone through with it, wanted to “detransition.” Showing that even the 18-year-old brain is undeveloped, a girl who lopped off her breasts (and Reed does not allege that the Transgender Center did or encouraged the lopping), later told a nurse, “I want my breasts back.”
• When Reed spoke up, she was told that, if she wasn’t 100% committed to the program, she should leave.

And here’s a video from a few years ago in which a St. Louis Children’s Hospital doctor discusses “supporting gender identity development in teens”:

Everything that Democrats have said about so-called “transgenderism” is a lie. It is, instead, a mental illness. It was rare when people understood that fact. However, now that it’s become a political tool for the left, America’s institutions are indoctrinating children into believing this mental illness and then destroying their minds and bodies forever. This must stop before we sacrifice multiple generations to these pagan obsessions with child sexuality.