Jamie Reed's story is being pushed by the worst of the worst anti-trans voices on the internet. I dig point-by-point through her claims and show how they undermine her conclusions.
I am a member of a Facebook group called "Actual Gender Critical Left." Your article was posted in reply to another member who posted the Jamie Reed article. I want to note that your statement, "Trans-exclusionary radical feminists often call themselves 'liberal' or 'progressive' but are anything but," is false.
Though I don't consider myself a "TERF" (which has become a slur along the lines of "b**tch" or "c**t), I do question many aspects of gender-affirming care, especially for young teens and teens. I am 61 years old, a woman (not trans), a mother of three now-adult children. I have been a progressive my entire life. I have never voted for a Republican, only Democrats, and have never supported a conservative issue. I voted for Elizabeth Warren in the primaries of the last election. Most of the gender critical women I know, or just the women questioning and concerned, are like me. Most don't speak out often because they don't want to be pilloried or have people associate them with the right-wing. They also don't want to align with the right's attacks on trans people.
It is simply not true that only Republicans or conservatives are questioning gender ideology and gender-affirming care.
If you didn't get this much right, I question how much else you got right in this response to Jamie Reed's article. I also wonder why you are attacking her as just "a desk job worker" instead of a medical professional. It's often people without power, lower in status, who are the whistleblowers in situations like this one.
I don't know anything about your background, but I'm curious to know if you have medical training? Does someone need to be a doctor or therapist to have a legitimate perspective on this issue? Because if you don't have that education yourself, then your criticism of Reed for not having that background doesn't make sense to me.
I also noticed -- unless I missed something -- that you don't mention in your rebuttal that she herself is married to a trans man. Is that because you don't believe her? Or is it because mentioning that would undercut your argument that she is aligned with the right on this issue?
I don't believe she was nefariously "misgendering" the patients. She used their birth sex as a necessary element of her reporting.
There are people of every identity who take on the project of promoting oppressive ideas. Black people who support the white supremacist project. Anti-gay queer people. And trans people who promote the reactionary agenda. This is not cover for her. Erin does a great job debunking on the merits.
"It is simply not true that only Republicans or conservatives are questioning gender ideology and gender-affirming care." <-- Close enough. And you are a Social Conservative who plainly wants children to die for the sake of your moral vanity.
Thanks for you point by point rebuttal of her case. Reasonable and sane people will understand her agenda and that of the GOP AG in going after this. Unfortunately this 'whistleblower' story will be like blood in the water for the trans feeding frenzy that the GOP is doing on the trans community this year. I fully expect a NYT trans hit piece that heavily references this investigation to land in the next week.
I suspect that Jamie Reed read Irreversible Damage right before writing her piece. "The overwhelming majority of our patients are white." "...most of these teens haven’t even had sex yet." "Sometimes clusters of girls arrived from the same high school." Even this thing about identifying herself as a liberal are all things that ID hit on over and over again. And that book was weird. I feel like both the book and the caseworker's piece have this thing going on, like Great Replacement Theory, Trans Edition. Like, because white kids are transitioning, white Americans are going to get replaced.
I suspect that JR is going to start appearing at TPUSA speeches.
As I tweeted, “That is how they did Plan Parenthood stuff for abortions. A receptionist claimed wild crazy crap and right wing Christians groups pushed it as fact and made movies over it”.
As someone from the St. Louis area originally, I cannot undeeremphasize what someone saying "from certain high schools" has the potential to mean. St. Louisians endow their high school system with a ton of socioeconomic meaning and stereotyping. Even now, as a trans adult living far away from MO, if a stranger is from St. Louis and finds out that I am as well, the first question will be what high school I went to. Without specifying the names of the schools, it's hard to deduce her implication above, but there almost certainly is some sort of implication being made.
If you're saying that "certain high schools" is race coding, that tracks. In Jamie's piece, she talks about most trans youth being white. In Irreversible Damage, the super transphobic book that this case manager seems to be plagiarizing, the author makes the argument a bunch of times that transness is a threat to white reproduction, that white fertility is at risk.
It tracks to race, but not *just* to race, there is class stuff, and the catholic/not catholic thing is still a BIG DEAL, or at least itnwas before I left iin the 90s
Without more details, its hard to know what shes getting at, but yeah, my read is that its definitely a race/class thing
I worry about transgender youth receiving poor quality medical care, and acknowledge that our community’s efforts to bypass transphobic constraints may have contributed to that. However, the solution to that issue, and other much more impactful issues, is not more restrictions on our ability to access care, but better care all around. Concerns about mistaken diagnoses are being weaponized by transphobic activists, it’s not an authentic effort to care for transgender youth.
She needs to be sued she needs to be in a courtroom and questioned by real professionals she’s probably leaving out that her attitude towards these children especially misgendering if she does that to them in person is hurting these youth and likely reason for poor performance reviews
I feel stunned and sickened. It wasn’t true. And I know that from deep first-hand experience that Jamie Reed is a fraud and probably being paid well too
Thank you Erin. As a provider of gender affirming care, this careful rebuttal of the article
Is useful.
I do want to point out one thing that you wrote:
“High blood pressure, high cholesterol, and sleep apnea are more common among men than women. This is not surprising or unusual. Gender affirming care changes the risk profile to the risk profile of the gender you have transitioned to.”
We don’t actually know if that is from the testosterone, or the fact that most men avoid primary care in their 20s and 30s. Historically, women had a reason to go whether they felt well or not (cervical cancer screening) and men did not. Often times, by the time they present back to primary care, they already had years of unmanaged hyperlipidemia, hypertension and diabetes. Trans men, on the other hand, if they want to remain on testosterone, are required to see a medical provider routinely to continue to receive their testosterone. During that visit, often times we will measure blood pressure and check labs that would identify hyperlipidemia or hyperglycemia. As primary care providers are more comfortable seeing men who have completed whatever their desired transition is, these patients will get refills at a routine checkup, rather than at a specialty clinic.
I subscribed before even reading the piece because I knew it would be brilliant and I was right. I follow you on TikTok as well. Thank you for your work to help protect our kids!! ❤️
I am a member of a Facebook group called "Actual Gender Critical Left." Your article was posted in reply to another member who posted the Jamie Reed article. I want to note that your statement, "Trans-exclusionary radical feminists often call themselves 'liberal' or 'progressive' but are anything but," is false.
Though I don't consider myself a "TERF" (which has become a slur along the lines of "b**tch" or "c**t), I do question many aspects of gender-affirming care, especially for young teens and teens. I am 61 years old, a woman (not trans), a mother of three now-adult children. I have been a progressive my entire life. I have never voted for a Republican, only Democrats, and have never supported a conservative issue. I voted for Elizabeth Warren in the primaries of the last election. Most of the gender critical women I know, or just the women questioning and concerned, are like me. Most don't speak out often because they don't want to be pilloried or have people associate them with the right-wing. They also don't want to align with the right's attacks on trans people.
It is simply not true that only Republicans or conservatives are questioning gender ideology and gender-affirming care.
If you didn't get this much right, I question how much else you got right in this response to Jamie Reed's article. I also wonder why you are attacking her as just "a desk job worker" instead of a medical professional. It's often people without power, lower in status, who are the whistleblowers in situations like this one.
I don't know anything about your background, but I'm curious to know if you have medical training? Does someone need to be a doctor or therapist to have a legitimate perspective on this issue? Because if you don't have that education yourself, then your criticism of Reed for not having that background doesn't make sense to me.
I also noticed -- unless I missed something -- that you don't mention in your rebuttal that she herself is married to a trans man. Is that because you don't believe her? Or is it because mentioning that would undercut your argument that she is aligned with the right on this issue?
I don't believe she was nefariously "misgendering" the patients. She used their birth sex as a necessary element of her reporting.
There are people of every identity who take on the project of promoting oppressive ideas. Black people who support the white supremacist project. Anti-gay queer people. And trans people who promote the reactionary agenda. This is not cover for her. Erin does a great job debunking on the merits.
Hint: If you can type out one "slur" and have to use asterisks for the others, they're not the same.
"It is simply not true that only Republicans or conservatives are questioning gender ideology and gender-affirming care." <-- Close enough. And you are a Social Conservative who plainly wants children to die for the sake of your moral vanity.
https://x.com/JolyonMaugham/status/1803729360731406489
Either you are insane, or you want the consequence of what you say you want. You do not have the excuse of claiming to be ignorant.
Thanks for you point by point rebuttal of her case. Reasonable and sane people will understand her agenda and that of the GOP AG in going after this. Unfortunately this 'whistleblower' story will be like blood in the water for the trans feeding frenzy that the GOP is doing on the trans community this year. I fully expect a NYT trans hit piece that heavily references this investigation to land in the next week.
I suspect that Jamie Reed read Irreversible Damage right before writing her piece. "The overwhelming majority of our patients are white." "...most of these teens haven’t even had sex yet." "Sometimes clusters of girls arrived from the same high school." Even this thing about identifying herself as a liberal are all things that ID hit on over and over again. And that book was weird. I feel like both the book and the caseworker's piece have this thing going on, like Great Replacement Theory, Trans Edition. Like, because white kids are transitioning, white Americans are going to get replaced.
I suspect that JR is going to start appearing at TPUSA speeches.
I didn’t know about that book you should checkout our Substack I wrote an article on the link to this great replacement stuff
https://open.substack.com/pub/mcvresearch/p/it-was-never-about-drag-shows-or?r=2093u9&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
As I tweeted, “That is how they did Plan Parenthood stuff for abortions. A receptionist claimed wild crazy crap and right wing Christians groups pushed it as fact and made movies over it”.
As someone from the St. Louis area originally, I cannot undeeremphasize what someone saying "from certain high schools" has the potential to mean. St. Louisians endow their high school system with a ton of socioeconomic meaning and stereotyping. Even now, as a trans adult living far away from MO, if a stranger is from St. Louis and finds out that I am as well, the first question will be what high school I went to. Without specifying the names of the schools, it's hard to deduce her implication above, but there almost certainly is some sort of implication being made.
If you're saying that "certain high schools" is race coding, that tracks. In Jamie's piece, she talks about most trans youth being white. In Irreversible Damage, the super transphobic book that this case manager seems to be plagiarizing, the author makes the argument a bunch of times that transness is a threat to white reproduction, that white fertility is at risk.
It tracks to race, but not *just* to race, there is class stuff, and the catholic/not catholic thing is still a BIG DEAL, or at least itnwas before I left iin the 90s
Without more details, its hard to know what shes getting at, but yeah, my read is that its definitely a race/class thing
I worry about transgender youth receiving poor quality medical care, and acknowledge that our community’s efforts to bypass transphobic constraints may have contributed to that. However, the solution to that issue, and other much more impactful issues, is not more restrictions on our ability to access care, but better care all around. Concerns about mistaken diagnoses are being weaponized by transphobic activists, it’s not an authentic effort to care for transgender youth.
She needs to be sued she needs to be in a courtroom and questioned by real professionals she’s probably leaving out that her attitude towards these children especially misgendering if she does that to them in person is hurting these youth and likely reason for poor performance reviews
I feel stunned and sickened. It wasn’t true. And I know that from deep first-hand experience that Jamie Reed is a fraud and probably being paid well too
Thank you for this comprehensive response to a shameful article.
Thank you Erin. As a provider of gender affirming care, this careful rebuttal of the article
Is useful.
I do want to point out one thing that you wrote:
“High blood pressure, high cholesterol, and sleep apnea are more common among men than women. This is not surprising or unusual. Gender affirming care changes the risk profile to the risk profile of the gender you have transitioned to.”
We don’t actually know if that is from the testosterone, or the fact that most men avoid primary care in their 20s and 30s. Historically, women had a reason to go whether they felt well or not (cervical cancer screening) and men did not. Often times, by the time they present back to primary care, they already had years of unmanaged hyperlipidemia, hypertension and diabetes. Trans men, on the other hand, if they want to remain on testosterone, are required to see a medical provider routinely to continue to receive their testosterone. During that visit, often times we will measure blood pressure and check labs that would identify hyperlipidemia or hyperglycemia. As primary care providers are more comfortable seeing men who have completed whatever their desired transition is, these patients will get refills at a routine checkup, rather than at a specialty clinic.
Thanks for all you do.
E
I subscribed before even reading the piece because I knew it would be brilliant and I was right. I follow you on TikTok as well. Thank you for your work to help protect our kids!! ❤️
There is another attack on Erin on the Substack Gender is harmful
Same person from twitter