Whistleblowers of children’s hospital gender clinics joined renowned talk show host and advice guru Dr. Phil (Phillip C. McGraw, Ph.D.) as he condemned the so-called “gender-affirming care” model of treating children with gender confusion using experimental drugs and disfiguring surgeries.
In an episode of Dr. Phil Primetime introduced on his Facebook account on April 10, the host said:
I have studied the research and there is no other instance where a medical profession has proceeded with little or no evidence showing whether or not these hormonal treatments are safe, long-term. And these treatments certainly are not reversible.
“But some of the largest and most powerful medical associations in the country, like the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, the World Health Organization, and the Endocrine Society, recommend that transgender youth be able to access this kind of health care,” Dr. Phil said.
Whistleblower Dr. Eithan Haim, who served as general surgeon at Texas Children’s Hospital, was initially interviewed by Chris Rufo, investigative journalist and contributing editor of City Journal.
Haim made headlines with his claim the hospital, which had released a public statement announcing it would shut down its gender clinic, was still providing “gender-affirming care,” after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued an opinion that such medical intervention could be investigated as child abuse.
“In March 2022, they had said they would no longer provide hormone-related interventions for transgender kids because of the legal risks,” Haim told Dr. Phil. “And that is as unequivocal as it gets.”
According to Haim, despite its declaration to end its gender services, the hospital actually never stopped providing the controversial treatments to children:
And the reason I knew that because I worked there … in the months following that, people I worked with had told me they were implanting these drug delivery devices in children as young as 11,12, 13 years old. And, you know, to hear that this was still happening after the fact that they said they had stopped was unimaginable. You know, every indication was that this program was shut down. But behind closed doors, they not only continued it but expanded it into a multidisciplinary clinic.
And when I saw that they were having lectures, they were giving – the directors of a program that supposedly did not exist. They were given the opportunity to speak at the hospital’s most prestigious lecture series. They were giving conferences, where they were talking about concealing it from the public. And as a doctor, you have a responsibility to the people you take care of. If you’re not willing to defend what you’re doing to those people in the public eye, then it’s very likely you’re doing something very, very wrong.
In a bombshell exposé at The Free Press in February 2023, Jamie Reed, who self-describes as “queer” and is married to a “transman,” worked at the Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, wrote she thought she was “saving trans kids” at her job, but now calls gender clinics for kids “morally and medically appalling.”
“We started to see patients who were experiencing very significant medical harms, being rushed to the emergency room with lacerations requiring stitches,” Reed told Dr. Phil.
We had patients contact us who were begging to have body parts put back on within months of having surgeries. And the thing that kept happening is, every time I would raise concerns and ask about the protocols and ask about the guidelines, this is just how the industry works. If a child says they’re trans, there’s no questioning it. We just say, “Yeah, you’re trans. What would you like?”
Reed described the surge in young female patients within the four-and-a-half years she worked at the gender clinic.
“When I started, I maybe would have five to ten new incoming patients a month,” she explained. “By the time I left, it was close to fifty every single month. My background is in clinical research. And so I started looking at the data. I wanted to know what the numbers told me. And towards the end of my tenure, 73% of the new patients coming to us were girls who were in their teen years.”
Reed explained the impact of social pressures and social media on teen girls, especially:
So, in that really vulnerable age of like 13 to 16, where they are just exposed to so many social pressures, and they’re so empathetic to what’s going on around them, too, that they really pick up on what’s going on in their peer group. We had clusters where it would be a handful of one whole high school classroom would come in all trans-identified…
And these girls were also learning on Tik-Tok, Instagram. They would come in and they would almost have the exact same storyline – like they learned what to say from a video to explain, “Oh, no, really, I’ve felt this way from early childhood,” but a lot of their parents couldn’t remember anything like that.
“And part of what’s going on right now is that if you question this at all, you are immediately called transphobic, you’re immediately called homophobic, you’re immediately considered a bigot, and it’s just not scientific reality,” Reed asserted, alleging teens could easily obtain life-altering treatments after just one of two short conversations with a therapist.
“One visit I saw letters being written approving children for puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones after a single visit with a therapist,” that lasted “30-40 minutes,” she told Dr. Phil, emphasizing that parents had little factual information to go on since gender clinic staff were regularly “lying” to them:
We were lying to parents. We knew we saw the lacerations. And when the parents said, “Have you seen any complications?”, we said “No.”
We knew we saw detransitioners. And when the parents said “Do you see any detransitioners?”, we said “No.”
Leor Sapir, Ph.D., a fellow at Manhattan Institute, told Dr. Phil that the events described by Reed are not isolated occurrences.
He said her comments reveal the deception behind criticism of laws that protect children from the transgender medical industry. These activists claim parents should be allowed to decide what is best for their children
“Framing this as a matter of choice – it’s very American,” Sapir said. “And putting this on parents is wrong.”
He continued:
Doctors should not be offering this in the first place. Doctors have a moral obligation and a professional duty to first “do no harm.” And to put this on parents, with threats of suicide, strikes me as parental abuse by the medical establishment. We need to stop putting this on parents, we need to stop saying let the parents decide. We should have doctors act responsibly as medical professionals.
The release of Dr. Phil’s show episode follows the publication of the long-awaited report by British pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass, who found “remarkably weak evidence” for the “gender-affirming care” model of treating children and adolescents with puberty blockers and hormone drugs.
“[G]iven that the vast majority of young people started on puberty blockers proceed from puberty blockers to masculinising/feminising hormones, there is no evidence that puberty blockers buy time to think, and some concern that they may change the trajectory of psychosexual and gender identity development,” the report stated.
The report added that “no changes in gender dysphoria or body satisfaction were demonstrated” as a result of puberty blockers.
