“We were bullying people into these concepts. It was an ideological bullying across the medical spectrum. And as you pull out of medicine, you see this in the schools, in journalism, in peer-reviewed publications—it’s everywhere.”
In 2018, Jamie Reed began working as a case manager at a pediatric gender center. But after witnessing firsthand the irreversible effect that “gender-affirming care” was having on children, she decided to speak out.
“At the end of the day in these centers, nobody was the responsible one. So, the therapists would write a letter thinking that the endocrinologist was making the decision, the endocrinologist would say, ‘But the therapist wrote the letter.’ And then they would all go and say, ‘But the parents are making the decision,’” says Ms. Reed.
She was recently instrumental in Missouri state legislation to extend the statute of limitations for those harmed by gender treatment. That fear of liability, claims Ms. Reed, was enough to close her former gender clinic.
Watch the video:
“I was complicit, I worked in an industry that was harming children. And the thing that I have to grapple with every day is making amends for that and trying to address the wrongs that I participated in,” says Ms. Reed.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:
Jamie Reed, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Jamie Reed:
Thank you so much.
Mr. Jekielek:
It’s been a year since you announced that you were going to blow the whistle on the pediatric gender clinic at Washington University. A lot has happened since then. What is it like to become a whistleblower in this field?
Ms. Reed:
Surprisingly, it has been very positive. This is a great cultural moment when this is a topic of huge interest to the American public. There are so many thoughtful, intelligent people who are discussing this, debating this, and having courageous conversations every day. I’ve really been welcomed into this network and circle of people.
Mr. Jekielek:
The clinic has now closed, so that has been a significant change.
Ms. Reed:
Yes. It was a bit of a process. In the state of Missouri, they did introduce some legislation. Similar legislation had been introduced for a few years previous to my whistleblowing. But after that occurred, the legislation was working through. The state of Missouri passed a law to impose a four-year moratorium on any new pediatric patient starting a puberty blocker, cross-sex hormones, or having surgery. There was a grandfather clause, so that anyone who had already been on these treatments could continue.
One of the things the legislature did is to increase the limit of time where somebody could sue if they were harmed by treatment. In most states this is really limited. It’s maybe one or two years. They increased the limit of time, and just that fear of liability closed the center. Most of the centers in the state of Missouri that were offering pediatric care have ceased to do so because of the extended period of time for liability.
Mr. Jekielek:
It’s incredible what a small change in legislation can do.
Ms. Reed:
It’s a small change, but it’s also interesting for the narrative. Because the narrative is that these are safe, effective treatments, and good long-term care. If that were the case, then nobody would be afraid of an extended period of time for malpractice.
Mr. Jekielek:
I read the affidavit you provided to the Missouri Attorney General. It’s utterly shocking. You were working at this clinic, and fully bought into the whole approach at one point. Please tell us how you got into this field.
Ms. Reed:
I’ve spent years working in social work doing case management, working with individuals who are coming into their own for age, being a teen, and learning how to navigate adulthood. I was working with young adults who were HIV-positive. There is a big overlap for some trans people and HIV, particularly for trans women who experience high levels of HIV infection. I was finding that a lot of the individuals that I was working with were trans-identified, so I became an expert in trans issues within that setting.
I was really good at helping people with things like legal name change and gender marker change. I understood these systems. I was looking at resources and ways to help people. This position came up working in the pediatric center and a number of people came to me and said, “You should apply for this. This really seems like something that you would be really good at.”
I applied and was hired in 2018. The center had only been open for a year. I was the second person to take on the role of the case manager in the center, and really probably only one of two people in the entire state of Missouri to have such a role. I really did go into this believing that we were going to alleviate suffering and help young people become their true selves and embody their truth.
Mr. Jekielek:
That is the core idea behind this ideology. If you help young people early on as they are questioning their gender identity, and if you deal with that early on, then you will have a healthy, happy person on the other side. That’s the core idea, would you agree?
Ms. Reed:
Yes, that’s the core idea behind the whole concept.
Mr. Jekielek:
Everything I’ve been learning over the last several years tells me the opposite is true.
Ms. Reed:
Yes. If you really start to look at where these treatments came from and evolved, and how we came to even be interfering in the pediatric body, you start to really question the whole model of care itself. When I started at the center, I didn’t know the history of how this developed out of something called the Dutch Protocol that came out of the Netherlands, and how truly revolutionary it was. Without a lot of good quality research, it was to start blocking puberty in a healthy developing body and go from a puberty blocker to a cross-sex hormone in a pediatric child’s body. As I worked in the center and began to understand more about where this came and what we were seeing in the population, so many truths about the treatment just weren’t holding water.
Mr. Jekielek:
One of the things that is in your affidavit is that in the Dutch model they excluded young people with psychiatric comorbidities. Whereas, in your work setting, almost every prospective patient had serious psychiatric comorbidities.
Ms. Reed:
Yes. The Dutch were excluding individuals with severe or concurrent mental health issues, but they were also excluding patients who did not have lifetime gender dysphoria. Part of their protocol was that people had to have been experiencing gender dysphoria from a very, very young age. In this cohort in the United States that is presenting in these clinics, there is a huge number of teenagers who do not have any lifetime or early onset gender issues. There are teens who have learned enough to say, “Oh, but I have been experiencing this from an early age.”
But we see this disconnect where they are claiming this, but there’s no real family history of it. In medicine, you want to not only trust, but also to verify. Somebody may tell me, “I’ve had this since my earliest memories,” but yet you can find nothing in their medical records. There was nothing recorded where they came to a pediatrician and mom had a conversation saying, “I’m concerned about my child’s gender presentation.” There is also nothing documenting this from a kindergarten teacher.
There is a really significant number of teens who are coming forward at age 15 and 16 with these presentations where we just don’t see any history of it. In the early research, these are patients that were always excluded. These were not patients that were included in these early treatment models.
Mr. Jekielek:
What were you thinking? You believed you were stepping into something that could be helpful to young people. Please explain to us the mental state, or the reality, or the core assumptions of a person that believes they’re helping people with this gender medicine.
Ms. Reed:
There are a number of themes that you see in pediatric gender medicine. At these centers, there are doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers who really do have strong beliefs about helping young people. They see them suffering. A lot of these doctors are young doctors, and they’re newer in these fields.
One of our doctors was directly out of residency and he was named a co-director. There is an intentional practice of hiring people directly from my community into these centers. They’re hiring individuals who are from the LGBT community, and that’s intentional. It also creates these feelings where you cannot go against these narratives, because you’re going against your own tribe. You’re going against your own people if you step forward and say, “I don’t see this working the way that it was sold. I see people being harmed.”
One of the reasons why there are so many lesbian, gay, bi adults working in this field is because they experienced gender questioning and confusion as a young person. For many lesbian, gay, and bi people it’s just part of our growing up. We experience gender in different ways. We are tomboys and what used to be referred to as sissy girls.
We experience gender differently. Part of the problem is that we see ourselves in these kids, yet, we have no good way of diagnostically differentiating who of these patients would just grow up to be a gay person, versus who might experience more of a lifelong gender-questioning pathway.
Mr. Jekielek:
Which, by all accounts, is extremely rare.
Ms. Reed:
Yes, that is extremely rare. Honestly, if you looked at earlier data, most of these kids are gay kids. One thing I struggle with is that we are taking away sexual function and fertility from our younger people. That is hard to face as an adult who has had biological children, who has been able to find comfort in my own gender and sex. We’re making these decisions and we’re taking this away from children.
Mr. Jekielek:
We’ve learned over the last few years about the power of social conformity and the need to belong that ultimately can take over rationality. As you pointed out moments ago, the effects on these kids can create a life of suffering. Is that oversimplifying it?
Ms. Reed:
No. We were not just in an ideological bubble, we were backed up by the university. Our culture right now is upholding places like these as if they are somehow sacred and not to be questioned. We didn’t just run the pediatric gender center. We infiltrated into other medical divisions. We had the audacity to go in and train these other divisions so that they would start to take on the language.
In my training I would directly say, “We’re not here to be the language police. But you can’t say certain things to your patients. You have to use whatever pronouns your patients come forward with. You have to change the charts to update how they’re identifying.” We were going into these medical systems like tentacles to shift things all across the board.
When we first did these training sessions in 2018, there was no pushback. The audience would be like, “Oh, they know everything. They’re so great.” By the end of 2022, other medical professionals were slowly starting to recapture what they already knew. They were starting to push back and ask questions. They would say, “Is there a line anywhere? Do we just affirm anything these children are saying?”
Part of the complicity that I still feel is that we were bullying people into accepting these concepts. It was ideological bullying across the medical spectrum. As you can see in medicine, in the schools, in journalism, and in peer-reviewed publications, if you question this gender medicine, you’re the worst of the worst. You’re transphobic. You’re homophobic. You’re a Nazi. It’s just remarkable how quickly all of these systems were captured.
Mr. Jekielek:
I’m going to read something about the center that I found, “The center tells the public and parents that it makes individualized decisions. This is not true. Doctors at the center believe that every child who meets four basic criteria; age or puberty stage, therapist letter, parental consent and a one-hour visit with a doctor, is a good candidate for irreversible medical intervention. When a child meets these four simple criteria, the doctors always decide to move forward with puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones. There were no objective medical tests or criteria or individualized assessments.” How is that even remotely possible?
Ms. Reed:
Those were some of the basic scientific questions that began to really trouble me. In medicine there should be a differential diagnosis done. Everyone presenting just statistically cannot come through to the other side meeting the differential. It’s almost like if everybody said, “I have rheumatoid arthritis,” and then everyone that self-diagnosed and presented that claim came out the other side with treatments for rheumatoid arthritis.
We had set up a system where children were basically fulfilling the role that we used to give to doctors that had the training to provide a differential diagnosis. What was so challenging was seeing it continue to fall on the kids. I would watch parents basically turn to their adolescents, who are struggling or in so much distress and say, “Do you know that you have to be sure about this? Are you really sure?” At the end of the day, everybody just looked at the kid.
As a parent, I know children are even more anxious and struggle even more if the adults in the room don’t tell them that they’ve got this covered and say, “We’re the adults. We make the decisions. It is not on your shoulders.” We have created a medical system where we have put all of this on the kids.
Imagine if you’re a kid and you say, “Yes, this is it. I know this is the treatment that I need,” and then you find out 2, 3, or 4 years later that it’s not. Then there is so much pressure on them to continue, because we have allowed them to make that decision on their own, a decision that should have never been theirs in the first place.
Mr. Jekielek:
There’s the incredibly heartbreaking anecdote about the young girl who asks to have her breasts put back on after a double mastectomy. I don’t even know what to say about that, but horribly misled and abused comes to mind.
Ms. Reed:
It was a failure on the part of so many individuals to allow her to have that surgery. But the thing that just was such a gut check was on the backend. You have a patient calling within three months of surgery reporting this, and the surgeon couldn’t even bother to take the call or call them back.
The person who actually removed this healthy tissue from this person couldn’t even be bothered to pick up the phone and call them back and hear their pain and acknowledge it. It was pushed off on myself and our nurse to do this follow-up. The hubris and the lack of willingness to see the harm that one did was horrible.
Mr. Jekielek:
What kind of accountability followed that scenario?
Ms. Reed:
There was no accountability. The university and the hospital administrators had no accountability. This made me realize that this was not an individual patient failure, this was a systematic failure, because this patient met the criteria. They had the letter from a therapist and had worked with the therapist ahead of time.
They had met with the organization called WPATH [World Professional Organization for Transgender Health]. It just continued to show me that the whole machine was broken, not just an individual cog here or there. The only way the machine could spin was to take someone and put them into the treatment path. There were no off-ramps at any point.
Mr. Jekielek:
You offer a few examples where treatment was declined for some very arcane reason. But this is a systemic problem and everyone gets pushed in the same direction. Is it just that people believe so deeply that this is what everybody must do? There are financial and incentive structures and I’ve spoken with people on the show about that. Do you understand how this works?
Ms. Reed:
There are a few elements that are hard for individual doctors within these systems to pause. At the center that I worked in, there were basically eight people on the team. There were only two individuals that touched every single chart. The two of us that touched every patient chart and saw every patient started picking up on the trend lines pretty quickly. We were seeing the harms, seeing that a significant number of patients were not doing well, and seeing the 30 percent loss in the follow-up rate. We were having patients start and then disappear.
The doctors were seeing the patients who started on a treatment and came back three months later and said, “Oh, it’s wonderful” and then six months later said, “Oh, it’s wonderful.” There were so many patients that they did not even see. A small number of the patients would go through and be happy. But we were pretty much seeing this 30 percent, 30 percent, 30 percent.
It was 30 percent saying, “This is great. I’m happy now. It was 30 percent that were having no change in the short term, either for better or for worse. Then 30 percent were really struggling and falling apart. Obviously, the treatments were immediately harming them. Initially, that was almost okay, because you could focus on that 30 percent that seemed to be doing well.
The longer I was there, with the patients that at year one were doing well, year two were doing well, year three were doing well, you started to see by year four they were not meeting what we would consider the goal of adolescence, which is growing up. We start them on a puberty blocker at age 13, and the thing we were saying about this treatment is, “We’re making you a happy, healthy kid.”
What do we expect from a 16, 17, or 18-year-old? We want them to be getting a driver’s license, maybe having their first job, maybe starting to think about college and maybe starting to progress outside of having a room full of stuffed animals.
We want them to be achieving the goals of adolescence, and then move into young adulthood. Even that 30 percent that we were claiming were good were still struggling behind their peers. I was also seeing that their identities were not staying consistent. These were kids who were initially claiming that they were a girl or a woman.
Four years later their identity had shifted to some vague non-binary status. The people that tout these treatments claim, “Oh, they’re just on their gender journey.” But as someone who’s been working as a social worker for years, I want to see people progressing through the stages of life, and these kids were just not doing that. I will concede that we have been transitioning humans for probably 40 to 50 years. In the 1960s and 1970s, we started some of these treatments with adults.
All of the trans adults that I work with and that I’m friends with today, intuitively always understood their biological sex. They recognized that these treatments were changing their outward presentation to make them feel more comfortable interacting in the world. But they did not have these dissociative concepts about their identity.
As adults, we have to talk to the younger kids and the younger cohort about the truth of what biological sex is, what the physical body is, and what can and cannot be changed. I’m a parent with kids who range from age 2 to 15. I’ve interacted with toddlers who will straight up ask you, “Am I a boy or a girl?” They rely on us to explain the reality of biology and sex to them, so that they can ground themselves in the reality of this world.
This young cohort really struggles with this group of adults who are lying to them and saying, “No, trans women are women. You are a woman.” They struggle with coming into adolescence and into young adulthood with that narrative, and then coming up against the actual reality of the world, which is that your biological sex does matter. I do support trans adults who find that the best way for them to move forward is to medically transition and to present to the world as a different gender. I recognize that it helps some people.
But what has never helped anyone is to try to create this upside down world where biological sex is ignored. For some of these patients, growing into adolescence and then into young adulthood brings this question, “Have my parents and these doctors been lying to me this whole time?” How does that lie affect someone trying to become themselves?
Mr. Jekielek:
We’re bringing up a whole generation of kids who are insecure in their identity, because they’re told they can be whatever they want it to be. They are told that it’s a spectrum, and you can change it from time to time if you feel like it.
Ms. Reed:
Yes. Children need a solid foundation, a grounding, and something to fall back on. You go out and explore, but you still have that foundation. If you do not have the foundation, and the foundation of your own physical body in space and time, of course the mind is going to become fractured and then struggle.
Mr. Jekielek:
How many patients did you see over the three years that you worked there?
Ms. Reed:
I worked there for almost four-and-a-half years. Nobody is keeping good records and nobody is keeping good data at gender centers in the United States. To actually have a dialogue, we need solid numbers and solid data. Since I left the center, this is one of the things I have been advocating for. I saw close to 1,200 individual, unique patients in my tenure, and we medicalized a significant majority of those.
You can look back at the original first pediatric center that opened here in the United States referred to as the GeMS [Gender Multispecialty Service]. Some of the data that I heard was that they were open for five years. In the first five years they medicalized 70 patients total. What is happening now in these centers is this rapid, very quick treatment.
Mr. Jekielek:
Do you reflect on your own participation in this process for these 1,200 patients? It just must be a difficult thing to deal with.
Ms. Reed:
It is. I’m a mom and my kids know very little about any of this. But if anything, I hope that my kids can take away that grownups have to be able to acknowledge that they made a mistake. I recognized that mistake probably by the second year of my tenure, and then I spent probably two years within the system trying to see if we could shift the care.
We would have case conferences and bring forward patients. I would advocate and say, “This patient does not meet criteria. I have a lot of concerns about this patient. Can we just put a pause on this?” I found myself almost begging or arguing in the case conference.
We would have young patients who had experienced sexual abuse or assault. I would ask, “Before we give this patient testosterone, can we ask them to do six months of trauma therapy? Can we see if we could help them to address the trauma first, before we do this irreversible change?” I spent a number of years trying to advocate in that way, and that went nowhere. Then there was this weird fear that if I left, I would simply be replaced by somebody even more ideologically driven.
Then there was this liminal space where I thought, “If I stay then potentially I could help some of these kids in some way.” But I was complicit. I worked in an industry that was harming children. The thing that I have to grapple with every day is making amends for that and trying to address the wrongs that I participated in.
Mr. Jekielek:
On this show, I’ve had a number of people in similar situations. They realized they were part of something that had huge problems. Then they came out and blew the whistle, and then had to grapple with it. That’s a rare thing and should be lauded. We live in a society where a lot of people have been complicit in things they’re not very proud of and will have to deal with it. But hopefully, as a process of healing, they will be admitting such things to themselves. How do we do that?
Ms. Reed:
It will be a process, and it is about being intentional. The part that I struggle with the most is when people come up to me and say, “Thank you so much for what you’ve done. You’re a hero.” No. I should have done more, quicker, sooner, and differently. A lot of this is asking for grace, giving myself the room for grace, and being willing to ask others for grace.
Now I find myself getting really close to a number of young people who have detransitioned, who went through these treatments and are grappling with the medical harms. One of the things that we all can do as a society, and especially doctors in general, is to acknowledge the person in front of us, what we have put them through, and not turn a blind eye.
I can’t go back and change the past but I can change every day in my future. That means listening when somebody reaches out to me and wants to sit down with me and tell me their story. I have detransitioners reach out to me and ask me, “Jamie, will you read through my medical records?” Because they know I understand how to do that.
We read through the records together and we talk through what I see from the insider’s point of view. I give them a space to be heard and I hope to walk with them in that journey. Because I can’t go back and change it, but I can at least do that and be side by side with them. Hopefully, I can help others, not ignore their existence, and see them as people. I also want to ask the medical community to be brave, acknowledge their existence, recognize them for who they are, and look at what we need to do now.
Mr. Jekielek:
What you’ve done, you have to live with. But every day is a new day and things can change in an instant if you make that choice. I expect that there are a lot of people out there now that are thinking these kinds of things. I expect you’re probably even talking to some of them.
Ms. Reed:
I am.
Mr. Jekielek:
There was a very thoughtful and appropriate process that you went through, which was to become a whistleblower. Let’s talk about this for people that might be thinking about it, and understand that there is some sort of recourse.
Ms. Reed:
Yes, whistleblowers are a very interesting group of people. You find whistleblowers across all industries. At this moment in time, this industry is going to continue to see a number of them. One of the things that I found really powerful was looking at Britain. There was a clinic called Tavistock in Britain, and there were a number of whistleblowers that came out of that clinic. There were a number of them working together within this bigger group.
In the United States right now you have all of these tiny clinics, where if you are feeling concerned or are thinking about being a whistleblower in one of those clinics here in the U.S., you’re going to feel really alone, because you might be the only one on your team. It took so long to get that affidavit at the AG’s office and work with the free press. It took months and months of background work.
It was about finding a team, building a team behind me, and having really long in-depth conversations about, “What are you willing to risk? What do you want to risk? What do you want to see happen out of this?” One of the things that I am working on building right now is a coalition of other lesbian, gay, bisexual and adult trans people. We’re calling ourselves the Courage Coalition.
We’re trying to build places for other whistleblowers to go, knowing that so many of the people that work in this industry are going to be people like myself, LGBT, knowing that you can land in a place where we can help you find legal representation, and knowing that other people have come before you. The biggest fears that I had of becoming a whistleblower is that I would be completely alone, isolated, and have to step off a cliff, basically.
Mr. Jekielek:
You would lose your livelihood. You mentioned that you’ve got five kids.
Ms. Reed:
Right. There are legal protections for whistleblowers, and there has to be. There are so many industries like this where you have to open up a channel for people to come forward and say, “There are harms.” One of the biggest areas for whistleblowers is medicine. With some other industries that are really dangerous, like finance, there are mechanisms in place.
Part of it is just being able to link people to the right attorneys and to the right support so that they know that they can be protected in their jobs and so that they have that safety moving forward. We are really working to build that specifically for this industry.
Mr. Jekielek:
What is the first step for a person who is watching and is thinking to themselves that it’s time. What should they do?
Ms. Reed:
We’re hoping to fully launch in a month-and-a-half. We will launch a website and launch a safe place to contact. Part of this is documentation, which is tough. You can have a story to tell, but we do live in a situation where you have to have documentation behind you.
Mr. Jekielek:
You’ve got to have the receipts, as they say.
Ms. Reed:
You have to have the receipts, which means collecting emails, collecting documentation, and learning how to redact things and scrub out what’s called PHI, private health information, scrubbing things out while still keeping the narratives, the stories, the evidence, and the proof.
But one of the things I’ve learned is that your employer is not a safe place to do this. Even if you just Google and look up just general whistleblower statutes, you probably don’t want to go to your internal HR systems. You’re going to need outside support for this. We’re in this really interesting cultural zeitgeist right now.
There are so many things about this moment in time, because we have things like social media. We have kids with cell phones at ages 7, 8, and 9 watching an algorithm that pushes them to endless TikTok videos of trans influencers.
One of the biggest myths that is being propagated is that suicide will be the final outcome. If we do not affirm or give these treatments, you will have individuals who are committing suicide. I hate to say this, but even the Ohio governor fell for it. But the data doesn’t show this to be true. Again, it’s one of those moments where we have put children in control.
We have created a scenario where you literally just gave the script to the kid for how to talk to the adult. If they didn’t already know it, now they’re going to get in the car and they’re going to know exactly what to say to their parents. Children need adults to be adults making decisions, and guiding and leading them. At the end of the day, nobody was the responsible one in these centers.
The therapist would write a letter thinking that the endocrinologist was making the decision. The endocrinologist would say that the therapist wrote the letter. Then they would all go and say, “But the parents are making the decision.” Nobody is stepping forward and being responsible, because if somebody started to do that, we would have to recognize that there are patients that we would have to say no to.
The thing that was so challenging was that nobody was ever told no. You cannot have a functional medical diagnostic determination if everybody always gets a yes. It’s just not statistically possible.
Mr. Jekielek:
This is a social contagion. You mentioned a lot of your patients were young girls probably caught up in this social contagion fueled by TikTok, and fueled by social media and the need to belong. You’re not going to be giving medical advice here, but as a parent who might have a kid in this situation, what should a parent do in general?
Ms. Reed:
This is so challenging. I remember one particular case from when I was screening all of the new incoming families and kids. There was a parent telling me the story where their child went to a summer camp. We think we’re being great parents. We pay the money. We give them this extra cultural thing to do as your artsy, theater summer camp.
Day one, Monday morning, the camp counselor put everybody around the circle to do the pronouns. He was telling these kids, “Go around the circle everybody and say what your pronouns are.” This was a five-day camp. By the end of Tuesday, the twelve-year-olds had already said that their pronouns were now they/them. Every day, it was the pronoun game. Every day, it was all about your identity. This is how malleable our children are.
By the end of Friday, that child was trans-identified, within five days. The parents recognized it. They said, “On Monday, they weren’t thinking about this at all. But by Tuesday, they were non-binary. By Friday they were trans.” The mom said to me, “I guess I have to support this or else my child will kill themselves.”
Mr. Jekielek:
They had already bought into this.
Ms. Reed:
The parents already knew that was the only response they should say. It is so insidious right now for parents. I’ve heard of parents who have literally moved their children out of this country. I know of parents who have been pulling children out of school and homeschooling. I recognize for individual parents, that might be the thing they have to do for their child.
But we all have to be willing to go to the school board meeting and say, “Please explain what is happening in our schools.” We have to go to the camp counselor on the Monday morning of the theater camp and say, “Can we have a conversation? Are you going to ask all of these twelve-year-olds what their pronouns are at the beginning of this camp?”
Everybody is afraid that if they do that, they will be immediately hit with, “You’re transphobic. You don’t understand. You’re anti-LGBT.” I will tell you as somebody from the LGBT community, it is not anti-LGBT to not be indoctrinating children into this ideology. The kids also told us, “This is a trend.” I had a patient tell me, “This is the new goth in my school.” Figure out what’s going on in your school district and go to the school board meeting.
If you walk into a room and everybody picks up a name tag and starts writing their pronouns on it, be willing to say, “No, I’m not doing that.” If you work in a business and everybody’s putting their pronouns at the end of their name you can say, “No, thank you. I’m not participating in this.” You can do that in a loving, caring, and kind way.
I just want people to know that you are not a bigot and you can still be supportive of adults who are lesbian, gay, bi, and trans. You do not need to feel like we need to indoctrinate the whole world into this. We need to go back to being able to acknowledge that people have different opinions and it is okay to say, “Hey, we don’t agree on this, but that’s cool. Thanks for sitting down and having coffee with me.”
Mr. Jekielek:
Jamie Reed, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Ms. Reed:
Thank you so much for having me.
Mr. Jekielek:
Thank you all for joining Jamie Reed and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.
This interview was edited for clarity and brevity.
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