NYT Treats Key Source’s False Allegations as an Aside in Latest Anti-Trans Smear

Azeen Ghorayshi provides no evidence that any of Jamie Reed’s allegations were correct. In fact, her reporting for the New York Times only reinforces the likelihood that Reed lied repeatedly. So, why is it so credulous and positive towards this questionable source?

Opinion, by Evan Urquhart

In the New York Times this morning, August 23, 2023, reporter Azeen Ghorayshi writes credulously about the wild, unproven allegations surrounding a St. Louis clinic that specializes in treating gender dysphoric youth. These are the allegations of Jamie Reed, a former clinic employee who has become an activist opposing all medical treatment for gender dysphoria in children (with some statements suggesting she even opposes treatments for adults).

(Read more of Assigned’s extensive prior coverage of this story here.)

Ghorayshi manages the seemingly impossible, combining examples of her main source’s repeated lies and no evidence of wrongdoing on the part clinic into an article structured to heavily imply Reed’s concerns were genuine, and warranted, in spite of the Times’ own reporting on the case. An early paragraph, which hints at corroboration for some of Reed’s allegations the article never produces, sets this bizarre tone:

screenshot from the New York Times

Jamie Reed alleged numerous things in her essay for the Free Press, and in the affidavit she provided to the Republican attorney general of MO. And, just like the local St. Louis reporters who first investigated this story, the Times found many of the allegations were untrue. But, unlike other stories covering these allegations, the Times downplays the falsehoods and seeks to make a case that despite Reed’s lies there’s something to be taken seriously in her attacks on a highly-regarded, University-linked clinic serving transgender youth.

One key allegation of Reed’s was that the St. Louis clinic failed to inform patients or their parents of the risks associated with treatments such as puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones. Following in the footsteps of other reporters who examined this claim months ago, Ghorayshi finds this was an outright lie. She writes, “[Reed’s] affidavit claimed that the clinic’s doctors did not inform parents or children of the serious side effects of puberty blockers and hormones. But emails show that Ms. Reed herself provided parents with fliers outlining possible risks.”

The Times also found new evidence of a false claim. Reed’s affidavit describes a patient who was harmed by bicalutamide, a drug that blocks testosterone. In Assigned’s first piece on Reed’s allegations, this anecdote stood out. We looked into the data on bicalutamide and found that liver toxicity is such a rare side effect with only individual case histories, and no statistical studies, documenting it as a rare adverse response. The literature suggested that when liver toxicity occurrs it does so within the first few days of starting treatment.

Ghorayshi located the mother of this patient who described a completely different situation than what Reed alleged. Her daughter had been on bicalutamide for a year, and the liver symptoms showed up only after the young patient also contracted COVID and took a second drug which also carried risks of liver problems.

If that’s not enough, the mother also provided emails directly contradicting Reed’s description of how she had responded at the time.

Reed claimed, “The parent said they were not the type to sue.” Ghorayshi was shown emails that proved this false:

screenshot from the New York Times

Somehow, despite these major questions about Reed’s reliability, Ghorayshi largely seems to take Reed at face value, portraying her as a former supporter of gender-affirming care who began to question it due to what she saw at the clinic, rather than as an unreliable source who has lied or stretched the truth again and again and whose descriptions of everything, particularly her own motives, should therefore rightly be suspect.

While the Times highlights these two key places where Reed seems to have lied and/or presented information that did not turn out to be true, the story avoids some notable additional examples of times Reed seems to have contradicted herself or provided information that was untrue. The Times never mentions Reed’s wild, totally evidence-free claim that children in St. Louis identified as inanimate objects. The only example of this Reed has ever given was a child who referenced being an “attack helicopter,” something Reed later admitted she knew was a reference to an internet joke despite relating it as if it were a belief about their gender a real child held.

The Times also chooses not to mention concerns about Reed’s mishandling of patients’ private medical records. And, while the Times spoke with multiple parents, including Jennifer Harris Dault, Ghorayshi doesn’t mention Dault’s concerns that Reed may have undermined some children’s treatment by misleading them about the resources available at the clinic while she was still an employee.

Why would a reporter downplay such serious concerns about an individual at the center of her story like this? How are readers served by such an incomplete portrayal of such an important source?

The answer can perhaps be intuited from the parts of the story that don’t directly concern Reed, the St. Louis clinic, or Reed’s allegations. These sections suggest a possible motive for downplaying concerns about Reed herself might be due to bias on the part of Ghorayshi against gender-affirming care, or perhaps a deep confusion on Ghorayshi’s part about the underlying science here.

Here’s a paragraph that attempts to explain how readers should think about the risk of detransition and regret, in the context of evaluating gender-affirming care as provided by clinics like the one in St. Louis.

screenshot from the New York Times

Charitably, Ghorayshi seems to be struggling to accurately convey the state of the evidence here. The first link, on the words “2 to 30 percent,” points to a paper in a somewhat obscure Spanish journal, and then mischaracterizes the study to which it points. The paper describes results on detransition and discontinuation, giving a range of 2 to 30 percent for studies of discontinuation. This wide range includes studies where patients may have continued treatment with other providers, in addition to discontinuation for detransition and discontinuation without detransition (such as discontinuation of a medication due to adverse medical effects). The same study found ranges from 0 to 2.4 percent for detransition/regret after surgery, and 0 to 10 percent for detransition/ regret after hormonal treatment. If Ghorayshi wanted to accurately characterize the full range of findings including detransition/regret after surgery to simple discontinuation, 0 to 30 percent would have been the correct figure based on her source.

The second link, on “new, unpublished survey” goes to a YouTube video posted by an organization called Re/DeTrans Canada. Ghorayshi also slightly misrepresents this. The queued section shows part of a presentation by Kinnon MacKinnon, who studies detransition. MacKinnon describes unpublished, presumably unreviewed findings that found the most frequently reported reasons why respondents had discontinued treatment were “health concerns, change in gender identity, and cost.” (A poster behind MacKinnon references a study in the Netherlands that found only 2 percent discontinuation based on pharmacy records.)

This is only one of many places where Ghorayshi skews the story in a seeming attempt to paint opposition to gender-affirming care in the strongest possible light. The piece seems to struggle mightily to do this while sticking to factual reporting, and as this paragraph shows it doesn’t always quite make it, misrepresenting the contents of its own cherry-picked links.

The piece also fails to deliver on one of its own key claim that the Times found corroboration for some of Reed’s allegations. Ghorayshi describes talking to dozens of parents, and does not provide a single account from a parent or anyone else that corroborates Reed’s claims. To the contrary, the examples seem to show patients and parents who are grateful to the clinic, some of whom have moved to ensure their children can continue to receive gender-affirming care.

It’s very unclear exactly where Ghorayshi might think she’s corroborated Reed. No section in the piece that includes a claim of Reed’s followed by corroborating evidence that it was true. Instead, the Times found evidence that many gender-dysphoric youth were seen by outside therapists who weren’t employed directly by the clinic itself. This was not among the claims Reed made. Instead, Reed claimed young people’s mental health issues went ignored and untreated, and that they were “automatically” given puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones.

screenshot from Reed’s affidavit

Reporting on an internal investigation conduced by Washington University into the clinic showed that fewer than half of all patients seen received such interventions, and while Ghorayshi doesn’t include that fact, she doesn’t contradict it either. Instead, she writes that the clinic had a large influx of patients, that the clinic relied on referrals to outside therapists to supplement their own small staff. She also writes that some transgender youth visited the ER during mental health crises. All told, the Times does not seem to have corroborated any of the specific allegations made by Reed.

The Times also found one former patient who was referred by her therapist after identifying as transgender for 3 years who started testosterone but now identifies as nonbinary. The patient told the Times she doesn’t regret her treatment but wishes more professionals had been involved, complaining that her 3 years of documented gender dysphoria as attested to by an outside therapist was enough for the team in St. Louis to agree she was a good candidate for testosterone. This, again, does not corroborate the specific allegations that were made.

Taken together, there is no reasonable way a reader who was new to the subject could read this story and come away with an accurate understanding of the science behind gender-affirming care, the stellar reputation of the St. Louis clinic, the substance of the allegations made against the clinic, the credibility of the person making these allegations, why such false allegations may have been made, or the stakes for trans youth and their families when false allegations become conventional wisdom. It is a failure of journalism on a level that is difficult to fully comprehend, and this story has only skimmed the surface of the misdirection and mendacity employed therein. If there was ever a question that the New York Times has been on a crusade against transgender youth, and willing to distort the science and platform known liars in order to undermine the medical care of vulnerable children, this story should answer that question once and for all.