“You Betrayed Us, Azeen”
A story on the allegations of former St. Louis gender clinic staffer Jamie Reed left parents who spoke with NYT reporter Azeen Ghorayshi crushed.
by Evan Urquhart
(stock image)
When Heidi first got in contact with Azeen Ghorayshi of the New York Times, there was one thing she made clear from the start: She would not participate in an article that portrayed the St. Louis clinic where her daughter had received lifesaving treatment in a negative light. The parent, whose last name we’re not using to protect the family’s safety, had never spoken to a reporter about her daughter’s treatment or transgender identity before. Now, though apprehensive, she felt she had to speak up.
Heidi and her husband aren’t members of TransParent, whose local chapter runs a support group for families of trans youth in St. Louis, or of any other formal or informal trans advocacy group. Private people, they disliked the idea of having a spotlight on themselves or their daughter. However, when a former worker at Washington University’s Transgender Center came forward with wild allegations, Heidi’s family was among those who saw their child’s most private medical information, twisted but recognizable, in that worker’s outlandish claims. Former staff member Jamie Reed claimed their daughter had developed liver toxicity from a drug called Bicalutamide which a doctor at the center had prescribed as a puberty blocker. Reed said the family had been so angry they emailed calling it a “huge P. R. problem” for the Center and they were lucky the family weren’t the type to sue.
This was false. There was no such email, the family had never regretted the treatment, and the link between the liver symptoms and Bicalutimide was murkier than had been presented by Reed. Reed’s allegations imply a parent who was furious after stopping a harmful and unnecessary treatment for her child. The real person behind that story is the mother of a trans girl whose gratitude for the Center knows no bounds.
As is now widely known, Reed’s allegations snowballed into a formal investigation of the Center for wrongdoing, emergency directives from the State Attorney General that would have halted medical transition for all patients, and culminated in a law banning the very treatments that helped Heidi’s daughter to thrive. Through it all, their family had to watch with the knowledge that their personal information had been twisted and manipulated, used to further political attacks on other families like theirs. The knowledge was particularly devastating for Heidi’s daughter, whose normally stellar grades suffered as a result. That’s why, despite a deep reluctance about speaking to reporters, and despite suspicions about Ghorayshi’s intentions based on her previous work, Heidi emailed her in early August, offering to tell her family’s story to the NYT.
According to Heidi, Ghorayshi responded quickly, eager to hear more. Alone among the people Ghorayshi spoke with, Heidi had something more than general information showing a picture of the Center that ran contrary to the sorts of things Reed claimed. Because her daughter’s history was in the affidavit, Heidi could provide Ghorayshi with the specific email to the Center, proving that Reed had misrepresented its contents. In layman’s terms, Heidi’s email allowed Ghorayshi to catch Reed in a lie.
The totality of Reed’s allegations contain many inaccuracies. Some are errors of medical understanding, places where Reed asserts things about the medicine, side effects, or standards of care in treatment of trans youth that simply aren’t true. Many others are broad statements, claims about how employees at the Center routinely conducted themselves. These have been contradicted by every patient and parent to have come forward thus far.
However, Reed’s allegations also contained specific details about certain patients, often including harrowingly personal information about children who struggled with their mental health. Of the families whose specific histories were shared, Heidi’s is the only one to have undergone a full investigation by a reporter. Their family produced records that directly conflict with what Reed alleged, calling other similarly detailed accounts into question as well.
According to Heidi, Ghorayshi recognized the significance of this. She describes the reporter saying her contributions “changed the trajectory of her story.” They met for hours, both remotely and in person, often with Heidi’s husband present. The family remained cautious in drawing boundaries with Ghorayshi, however. Though the reporter pushed, they never agreed to let her speak directly with their daughter, now college age.
One frequent topic of discussion was what Ghorayshi would be writing. If it turned out to be a negative story about the Center the family insisted they reserved the right to pull out.
On August 22, the day before publication, Heidi says she began to fear the story would be just that. She’d traveled three hours to Springfield, Missouri to watch Reed testify at the Greene County Courthouse in a hearing on whether to allow Missouri’s gender-affirming care ban to come into effect.* Ghorayshi was there too, and watching Ghorayshi interacting with Reed “in the exact way she was talking to us,” Heidi began to suspect the story would be a positive portrayal of Reed, the woman she’d proved had misrepresented her daughter’s private medical history in a sworn affidavit. Angrily, she confronted Reed, identifying herself as “liver toxicity mom.” During their encounter she describes seeing Reed looking over to Ghorayshi during the encounter, seeking support.
According to Heidi, the confrontation ended with herself in tears, and Reed laughing as she walked away. “This is a positive portrayal of her,” she recalls telling Ghorayshi. “We’re out. We’re out.”
This wasn’t what Ghorayshi wanted to hear. As Heidi describes it, Ghorayshi followed her to her car, at one point standing in an open car door to prevent them from driving off, adamantly arguing for the family not to leave, not to end the conversation, and above all not to pull out of the piece. Eventually, Heidi and her husband drove away, feeling certain that they were through. But Ghorayshi called and called, and eventually they relented, allowing her to come to a hotel room they’d booked for the night. There, the three spent hours going over every paragraph, as described in detail by Ghorayshi, of what the upcoming NYT article would contain.
Heidi and her husband weren’t happy with what they heard, but now they were faced with a terrible dilemma. If they pulled out of the story there would be nothing on the record showing that Reed’s affidavit directly misrepresented a specific event.
“You’ve betrayed us, Azeen. You have completely betrayed us,” Heidi recalls telling Ghorayshi that night. Defeated, they eventually agreed that their story would remain in the piece.
Heidi isn’t the only parent to feel betrayed. Jennifer Harris Dault, who was also quoted in the NYT story, describes feeling foolish about how much she’d trusted Ghorayshi, saying at one point she’d even thanked her for her reporting. This was before the story came out.
Harris Dault describes Ghorayshi as seeming deeply empathetic, saying she “really seemed to understand” what their family had been through. They’d moved from Missouri to New York to preserve the option of seeking gender affirming care for their 8-year-old, an example of the truly devastating effects Missouri’s gender-affirming care ban has had on families who support their trans kids.
Nervous about the story, Harris Dault recalls a moment when she felt her fears had been calmed. She’d asked Ghorayshi what she’d found in her reporting and says the reporter told her that, not only had she found nothing criminal, she“found nothing that would be considered unethical" that the clinic had done.
If that’s an accurate representation of what Ghorayshi believed she had found, it seems to have gotten a bit muddled in the piece that she wrote. The story ends on a note of seeming to validate Reed, whose allegations contained serious reports of potentially criminal behavior by Center staff:
screenshot from the New York Times
All the illusions Harris Dault held that the story would help families of trans youth in Missouri came crashing down on the morning the NYT piece went live. Harris Dault describes waking up to the notification and reading it straight away. She remembers thinking "this clearly doesn't sound like the article we discussed."
Like the other parents I spoke with, Harris Dault let Ghorayshi know how disappointed she was.
Becky Hormuth describes first meeting Ghorayshi in a group setting with other families, organized by local advocacy groups. The meeting, which lasted 3.5 hours, was deeply emotional, with “several bouts of tears.” She describes Ghorayshi at one point tearing up as well, leaving her with the impression of a deeply empathetic person, someone who could be trusted with the stories of some of the most vulnerable families in the U. S.
Ghorayshi expressed interest in hearing more from Hormuth because her son’s experience of receiving extensive psychiatric help directly contradicted Reed, whose allegations accuse the Center of lying to parents about offering such help. Hormuth agreed to let Ghorayshi follow up, and says she spent hours in a video call with the both reporter and her trans son. (Unlike Heidi, whose child is now a young adult, and Harris Dault, whose family has moved to safety out of state, Hormuth’s son is a minor who continues to rely on the Center for his treatment.)
Like Harris Dault, Hormuth remembers trusting Ghorayshi, even defending her to other parents who warned her that the reporter was manipulative and couldn’t be trusted. Now, looking back, she says “I was so dumb.”
The day of the NYT story, Hormuth was at the courthouse in Springfield. Also present were other parents, detransiton activists, Ghorayshi, and Heidi. (Hormuth and Heidi both describe meeting one another that day, for the first time.) Hormuth’s morning had been spent driving to court and phones weren’t allowed to be used inside the hearing, so she didn’t read the story until the lunch break. Once she’d read the story, like the other parents, she was very disappointed and very angry. She confronted Ghorayshi, and remembers saying something like, "You fucking gave [Reed] too much credit. I feel we kind of got screwed over because we gave you all of this information, our records, everything to show you how she'd lied. We gave you all this."
Later, still angry, she sent Ghorayshi the entry on Reed in a transgender community resource maintained by Andrea James, Transgender Map. The entry describes the reporter as an anti-trans activist.
screenshot from Transgender Map
"I am not an activist. I am a journalist,” she recalls Ghorayshi replying.
From a journalistic perspective, if Ghorayshi erred it was by allowing her biases to get in the way of clearly informing readers about exactly what Reed’s allegations contain, and whether they have or have not been partially confirmed. Journalistic ethics is intentionally silent on whether a source should be happy about the results of a rigorously reported piece. It was Ghorayshi’s job to report the truth, not to treat her sources with compassion and care. So, by purely journalistic standards, there’s nothing here that Ghorayshi can be said to have done wrong. While many reporters hold themselves to higher moral and ethical standards, particularly when it comes to how their reporting impacts vulnerable communities, others choose not to, and the profession does not demand it of them.
Assigned asked each of the parents for one final thought, something they wanted to get across that hadn’t been in Ghorayshi’s piece. Jennifer Harris Dault wanted people to understand that the parents of trans youth care deeply about the treatment their children receive. “We care about the clinic we take our children to. We care that it is providing ethical care. We care that it is following the standards of care. But using the words of this person [Reed] who has been shown to be unethical, to deny healthcare to all these people, just isn’t right. In Missouri, politicians are making health care decisions right now, none of whom are qualified to do so.”
Becky Hormuth says she keeps going back to the healthcare aspect. “She [Azeen] could have highlighted that our kids have been treated for all these things, that our kids are thriving and doing well. She had proof that our kids are thriving. But instead she made everything that had to do with that about kids who are suffering with mental health issues. Our healthcare system has struggled with that for a long time, and she’s taking these flaws that are in a whole system and laying it at the feet of one clinic.”
Heidi was most concerned that the Transgender Center’s lack of response to Ghorayshi’s questions would be seen by many people as their having something to hide. “How can we ask them to keep our privacy and get mad when they say they can’t say anything publicly because of our privacy? You can’t apply two different standards. How are we not taking them as credible when we know they can’t talk?”
In the reporting for this story, Assigned Media reached out to Ghorayshi, and shared detailed descriptions from our reporting notes, for both comment and fact-checking purposes. Ghorayshi declined to participate. A spokesperson for the New York Times provided this comment:
The piece you’re referring to was rigorously reported and edited, thoughtful and sensitive to the moment. The Times stands behind its publication unreservedly.
The role of an independent news organization is to report on issues of public importance and follow the facts where they lead. The Times has been committed to this mission and will continue to report carefully and thoroughly on complex topics.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this sentence misspelled the name of Greene County Courthouse.