Jamie Reed’s Compromised Record Has Mom Reeling
The mother of a trans girl, who sought help from the Washington University Pediatric Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, believes that Jamie Reed misled her about the resources available at the clinic to help her daughter thrive.
by Evan Urquhart
Parents who sought help at the Washington University Pediatric Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital are still making sense of the revelation that their former case manager, Jamie Reed, secretly kept a spreadsheet of patient information, shared misleading information to the press, and claims to believe gender affirming care is harmful to youth.
Reed’s allegations about the Transgender Center’s practices, which she went public with on February 9 on Bari Weiss’ Free Press, have come to seem increasingly dubious, with errors in her characterization of the effects and side effects of puberty blockers and cross sex hormones, an attempt to mischaracterize a reference to a meme as meaning a child believed they were a helicopter, and accounts from numerous parents and patients directly contradicting many of Reed’s key claims.
One such parent is Jennifer Harris Dault, whose 8-year-old daughter (who we agreed to refer to as Hope), is trans. Harris Dault first described her interactions with Reed on Twitter, writing about how, two years ago, Reed told her that the Transgender Center did not see children before puberty. Reed also said that while she was going to send a list of therapists, the people on the list didn’t normally see young children unless they were engaging in self harm. It was only after seeing stories about Reed’s allegations in the press, and then comparing stories with other parents of trans youth, that Harris Dault realized what Reed told were was been incorrect: The Transgender Center is happy to do educational visits for younger children, and that therapists work with young kids all the time.
“She seemed great,” Harris Dault told me via Zoom, referring to the way Reed had presented herself on the intake phone call. “She affirmed that we were doing the right things, and I thought what she was telling me was true. She said, ‘Unless something changes and you’re really worried we don’t need to hear from you or see your kid.’”
One of Reed’s core allegations, which has been disputed by many families, has been that adolescents who came to the Transgender Center were seen only a couple of times before hormones were prescribed, and that thorough assessments of these youth were never done. But, if Harris Dault’s recollection is accurate, Reed directly dissuaded her from seeking an appointment with the Transgender Center until puberty had already started, and claimed that therapy was unnecessary unless her child engaged in self harm.
As her daughter grew older, Harris Dault described how the girl began to ask questions about how and when her body would change. “We were reading books about having babies and Hope would ask things like ‘Do I have a uterus? I’m a girl, and I want to be a mom.” While these weren’t distressed or panicked questions, she wished she had more resources to help her talk with her trans daughter about her body, puberty, and what options she would have when she grew up. Instead of considering the Transgender Center, she says, she asked around to other parents, hoping there was a book.
It wasn’t until after Reed’s allegations went public that she heard about other family’s experiences, including educational visits at the Transgender Center when their children were young. That’s when she remembered her phone call with Reed, and began to reconsider them in this new light.
“Wait, this is the person we spoke with,” Harris Dault said, describing her thoughts. “Were we given correct information? Were we gatekept?”
Harris Dault has since called the Transgender Center to ask about making an appointment for her daughter after all. While she says they couldn’t comment on anything she’d previously been told by Reed, they were happy to offer an educational visit to help Hope understand her body and talk with her about what’s to come.
This is welcome news, but for Harris Dault it’s been a difficult experience to re-engage with the clinic after her trust has been so shaken. And, her doubts are only intensified by the way Reed handled personal information from the patients she saw.
“It’s terrifying. I have seen people who have said ‘I think that’s me,’” she said, explaining that, in the small community of parents whose children were treated at the Transgender Center, many of the people Reed describes could be identified based on the details Reed shared. These details included some of the notes from a therapist’s letter quoting one patient’s exact words, an extremely rare side effect another experienced, a description which included a third patient’s race, and more. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, more commonly known as HIPAA, is described on the CDC’s website as, “a federal law that required the creation of national standards to protect sensitive patient health information from being disclosed without the patient’s consent or knowledge.” Questions about whether Reed’s behavior violated HIPAA, particularly in her essay for the Free Press and in the information she shared with gender critical reporter Jesse Singal, have circulated widely of late.
The Saint Louis Post-Dispatch discussed the questions about Reed’s handling of personal information in a panel below one of their articles, headlined, “Activists take aim at controversial St. Louis transgender clinic, but draw counterprotesters.” The Post-Dispatch received a comment from one of Jamie Reed’s lawyers, screenshotted here:
screenshot from the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch
As parents reel from the revelations that a case manager they trusted to facilitate care for their children harbored unspoken doubts about the treatment, kept a spreadsheet containing their personal medical information, and has now publicly come out in opposition to all gender affirming care for youth, Harris Dault isn’t the only parent with concerns about whether Reed may have interfered with their child’s ability to get treatment at the Transgender Center. At the very least, Reed has interfered with the ability of parents to trust that the workers who are charged with helping them navigate their children’s healthcare needs all have their children’s best interests at heart.