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Jamie Reed: The Courage to Admit You’re Wrong Jamie Reed

Published

1 year ago

January 1, 2024

Jamie Reed at home in Missouri. (Photo by Theo R. Welling.)

Jamie Reed became a lightning rod in our pages earlier this year after she blew the whistle about the mistreatment of minors at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, where she’d worked as a case manager for four years. Her revelations sparked an investigation of the clinic by the Missouri Attorney General, and this helped lead lawmakers in Missouri and other states to pass bans on gender transition of minors.

In early November, Reed was invited to speak in Golden, Colorado, at the first U.S. conference for Genspect, an organization that discourages gender transitioning of minors. We felt her remarks—about questioning authority, even if it’s the deeply held beliefs of one’s own political party—were an important reminder of our own mission, both as journalists and as citizens. So we have published an edited version of her speech below, in the hope it might inspire you, too. We look forward to seeing your thoughts in the comments.

After I became a whistleblower in February, revealing the appalling medical treatment of minors with gender dysphoria, I had some confounding responses from members of the public. The most shocking was that I was somehow a traitor to my progressive beliefs.

So many critics and media outlets tried to paint not just me but the entire issue of transgender youth as a showdown between the right and left. As a lifelong member of the left, a queer woman married to a transman, I’d clearly been brainwashed or paid off—or probably even both—by conservatives. I had a “clear ideological bias.” Even my hometown’s left-leaning newspaper was more interested in the political affiliations of my attorneys than the substance and science of my claims.

When I met with New York Times writer Azeen Ghorayshi, who wrote a story about the controversy after The Free Press first broke the news, she kept insisting that I’d changed in some fundamental way. Her piece, which was published in August and mostly confirmed my account, portrayed me as someone who’d left her core values behind. Since joining the clinic, my views had, in Ghorayshi’s words, “hardened and become political.”

I respectfully disagree. I’m no more or less political than I’ve ever been, and my views certainly haven’t hardened. What changed was my realization that I—along with so many other smart, well-intentioned, compassionate people like me on the left—was wrong.

It sucks to admit that you’re wrong. It’s not just humbling; you also have to take a closer look at how you were complicit in misleading others. I’m not proud of my eager participation in the pediatric gender industry, which has led thousands of youths astray, medically treating their dysphoria when many of them mainly needed counseling. But my progressive beliefs aren’t what led me down the wrong path. In fact, those beliefs are what helped me finally see the light.

I was raised to believe in the core principles of the Democratic Party, which includes the willingness to sacrifice one’s individual needs for the good of the collective society. In college, I became a radical. I was anti-capitalist and anti-globalization. I read books by left-wing heroes like Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Derrick Jensen. I lived in an anarchist collective and was pepper-sprayed at protests for everything from the Bush-Gore presidential debate in 2000 to the Iraq War invasion in 2003. I remained firmly embedded in the radical left for decades. For as long as I can remember, I believed in and fought for transgender rights. My peers and I rebelled against the idea of strict gender roles and gender conformity. The old ideas of what a man and woman had to be were outdated and repressive. But we attacked these problems by trying to change the culture, not by irrevocably changing our bodies.

When I became a mother in 2008 at 27 years old, I started to veer away from extremism and toward a more centrist, mainstream liberalism. But I never let go of those original ideals.

My convictions are what brought me to work at the St. Louis Children’s Hospital in 2018. I firmly believed that what the center was doing was important and that we were preventing needless suffering, helping young people become their true selves at last.

The road to hell, as they say, is paved with good intentions.

We had good intentions, but we were misinformed. We didn’t really understand the Dutch studies, published between 2011 and 2014, and like many leftists, we thought they proved that the use of medical interventions for gender-dysphoric youth would vastly improve these children’s lives. We weren’t aware of what was happening across the pond at Tavistock, the UK’s only gender identity clinic for children, which will close its doors permanently next year after reports that they fast-tracked medical procedures.

We weren’t aware of the irreversible medical harm we were doing. But when we started to wise up, it didn’t mean my entire liberal worldview evaporated. If anything, it just reinforced my views.

When I realized I was wrong, I didn’t instantly conclude that everything I’d been taught throughout my life was a lie. Instead, it just stirred in me the desire to be more vigilant and informed. I educated myself. I read the research—not just skimmed, but studied—and I started to listen to people, smart people, outside of my bubble.

The left I know believes that science is real. We accept scientific evidence even if it contradicts our political talking points. The left I know doesn’t cower in the face of bullies, which is why whistleblowers like me exist. It’s why Anna Hutchinson exists; it’s why Dr. Riittakerttu Kaltiala exists.

I went back to my roots. I became that anarchist punk again, who was willing to question authority when authority was clearly wrong. I went back to the core values that had guided me from such a young age—which isn’t, by the way, “assume those on the left are always the good guys.” I wanted to make the world a safer, saner place for everyone.

Being an adult means accepting responsibility and realizing that you never stop learning. It’s not about finding one political extreme or another and holding your ground. We all need to be better at listening. The moment you’re convinced that you have it all figured out—trust me, you don’t.

I want the same thing for my boys—I have five between the ages of two and 15. Maybe not my exact journey, but I want them to be passionate about their beliefs, to find the ideals worth fighting for and the willingness to keep looking for answers. I hope my children explore the world, question everything, and read books that shake them to the core. Above all, I want them to make mistakes and have the courage to say, “I was wrong. I’ll do better.”

Imagine a world where we all had the grace to say that—and mean it.

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TGIF: Hard Pivot Nellie Bowles

Published

3 hours ago

January 17, 2025

admin

Welcome back. This is where, once a week, for a special reprieve, we look at the news and tell jokes. If you’re here for spiritual guidance, I can’t help you (but just in case: yes, you are forgiven your sins).

→ Biden says goodbye: President Joe Biden gave his farewell address Wednesday night, leaving with ominous warnings about dark forces (billionaires) exerting too much influence on American politics. “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

I agree there is a new oligarchy of rich people who manipulate our political landscape, and I, for one, am glad that our president finally sees the danger of MacKenzie Scott and George Soros, billionaire political donors propping up untold numbers of causes. He’s never criticized MacKenzie Scott (formerly Bezos), but I’m sure he was thinking of her, the woman who has thrown $19 billion at activist nonprofits to sway American politics. I’m sure when he just recently gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to George Soros, he was thinking this is the dangerous oligarch I will speak of soon.

No, I’m being silly. Obviously he means the other side’s dangerous oligarchs! When a billionaire oligarch is throwing money at your own team, they’re just a concerned citizen doing what they can with what they have. Me, I’m balanced, moderate: I love all our oligarchs, on both sides. I want more oligarchs and less democracy. I want our political battles to be fought on warring yachts off the coast of Croatia. See, California lets voters vote on everything, and I’ve seen what too much democracy looks like, and I think that Penny Pritzker and Peter Thiel could sit with each other and come up with something better for us.

Biden continued: “President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. . . . Six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well. Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families, and our very democracy from the abuse of power.”

First of all, Mr. President, The Free Press is doing great. But I love that Biden’s final address to the nation, his farewell, was about the need for Facebook fact-checkers. It was a presidency built around calling the refs, making us feel bad for any criticism (Hunter is a baby boy), and then if that didn’t work, just banning whatever the staff didn’t like that week.

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January 16, 2025 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

6 hours ago

January 17, 2025

admin

In his final address to the nation last night, President Joe Biden issued a warning that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

It is not exactly news that there is dramatic economic inequality in the United States. Economists call the period from 1933 to 1981 the “Great Compression,” for it marked a time when business regulation, progressive taxation, strong unions, and a basic social safety net compressed both wealth and income levels in the United States. Every income group in the U.S. improved its economic standing.

That period ended in 1981, when the U.S. entered a period economists have dubbed the “Great Divergence.” Between 1981 and 2021, deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, the offshoring of manufacturing, and the weakening of unions moved $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.

Biden tried to address this growing inequality by bringing back manufacturing, fostering competition, increasing oversight of business, and shoring up the safety net by getting Congress to pass a law—the Inflation Reduction Act—that enabled Medicare to negotiate drug prices for seniors with the pharmaceutical industry, capping insulin at $35 for seniors, for example. His policies worked, primarily by creating full employment which enabled those at the bottom of the economy to move to higher-paying jobs. During Biden’s term, the gap between the 90th income percentile and the 10th income percentile fell by 25%.

But Donald Trump convinced voters hurt by the inflation that stalked the country after the coronavirus pandemic shutdown that he would bring prices down and protect ordinary Americans from the Democratic “elite” that he said didn’t care about them. Then, as soon as he was elected, he turned for advice and support to one of the richest men in the world, Elon Musk, who had invested more than $250 million in Trump’s campaign.

Musk’s investment has paid off: Faiz Siddiqui and Trisha Thadani of the Washington Post reported that he made more than $170 billion in the weeks between the election and December 15.

Musk promptly became the face of the incoming administration, appearing everywhere with Trump, who put him and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, where Musk vowed to cut $2 trillion out of the U.S. budget even if it inflicted “hardship” on the American people.

News broke earlier this week that Musk, who holds government contracts worth billions of dollars, is expected to have an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House. And the world’s two other richest men will be with Musk on the dais at Trump’s inauguration. Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg, who together are worth almost a trillion dollars, will be joined by other tech moguls, including the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman; the CEO of the social media platform TikTok, Shou Zi Chew; and the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai.

At his confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Finance today, Trump’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, billionaire Scott Bessent, said that extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts was “the single most important economic issue of the day.” But he said he did not support raising the federal minimum wage, which has been $7.25 since 2009 although 30 states and dozens of cities have raised the minimum wage in their jurisdictions.

There have been signs lately that the American people are unhappy about the increasing inequality in the U.S. On December 4, 2024, a young man shot the chief executive officer of the health insurance company UnitedHealthcare, which has been sued for turning its claims department over to an artificial intelligence program with an error rate of 90% and which a Federal Trade Commission report earlier this week found overcharged cancer patients by more than 1,000% for life-saving drugs. Americans championed the alleged killer.

It is a truism in American history that those interested in garnering wealth and power use culture wars to obscure class struggles. But in key moments, Americans recognized that the rise of a small group of people—usually men—who were commandeering the United States government was a perversion of democracy.

In the 1850s, the expansion of the past two decades into the new lands of the Southeast had permitted the rise of a group of spectacularly wealthy men. Abraham Lincoln helped to organize westerners against a government takeover by elite southern enslavers who argued that society advanced most efficiently when the capital produced by workers flowed to the top of society, where a few men would use it to develop the country for everyone. Lincoln warned that “crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings” would crush independent men, and he created a government that worked for ordinary men, a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

A generation later, when industrialization disrupted the country as westward expansion had before, the so-called robber barons bent the government to their own purposes. Men like steel baron Andrew Carnegie explained that “[t]he best interests of the race are promoted” by an industrial system, “which inevitably gives wealth to the few.” But President Grover Cleveland warned: “The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor…. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”

Republican president Theodore Roosevelt tried to soften the hard edges of industrialization by urging robber barons to moderate their behavior. When they ignored him, he turned finally to calling out the “malefactors of great wealth,” noting that “there is no individual and no corporation so powerful that he or it stands above the possibility of punishment under the law. Our aim is to try to do something effective; our purpose is to stamp out the evil; we shall seek to find the most effective device for this purpose; and we shall then use it, whether the device can be found in existing law or must be supplied by legislation. Moreover, when we thus take action against the wealth which works iniquity, we are acting in the interest of every man of property who acts decently and fairly by his fellows.”

Theodore Roosevelt helped to launch the Progressive Era.

But that moment passed, and in the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, too, contended with wealthy men determined to retain control over the federal government. Running for reelection in 1936, he told a crowd at Madison Square Garden: “For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves…. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.”

“Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today,” he said. “They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”

Last night, after President Biden’s warning, Google searches for the meaning of the word “oligarchy” spiked.

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Notes:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2025/01/15/remarks-by-president-biden-in-a-farewell-address-to-the-nation/

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/great-disparity/

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31010/w31010.pdf

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-07-10-bidens-unheralded-war-on-poverty/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/unitedhealth-lawsuit-ai-deny-claims-medicare-advantage-health- insurance-denials/

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/13/us/politics/elon-musk-white-house-trump.html

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/which-big-tech-ceos-will-be-at-trumps-inauguration-see-the-full-list/6110692/

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trumps-us-treasury-pick-bessent-says-extending-tax-cuts-top-priority-2025-01-16/

https://www.thedailybeast.com/searches-for-what-is-an-oligarchy-spike-after-bidens-warning/