Those priors won’t confirm themselves!

Bari Weiss’s awful but lucrative group blog recently published a lurid, unsubstantiated first-person account of misconduct at a Missouri gender care center. As intended, this got a lot of attention from pundits and public officials who are somewhere on the “frothing anti-trans” to “skeptical about gender care, especially any treatments given to those under 18” spectrum. While her blog presented a somewhat sanitized version of her story, here’s a sample of Reed’s related affidavit:

Children come into the clinic using pronouns of inanimate objects like “mushroom,” “rock,” or “helicopter.” Children come into the clinic saying they want hormones because they do not want to be gay. Children come in changing their identities on a day-to-day basis. Children come in under clear pressure by a parent to identify in a way inconsistent with the child’s actual identity. In all these cases, the doctors decide to issue puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones.

I see, so children are coming into the clinic with pronouns like “mushroom” and “helicopter,” and are immediately given medical treatments to help them transition into, uh, mushrooms and helicopters? At this point, it should be obvious the chances that this person is a fabulist kook must approach 100%. I mean, who do you think is more likely to remember an obscure three-year-old literary controversy, a random teenager in Missouri or the kind of Online As Hell activist who would take her anti-trans rants to the House of Bari? And to paraphrase a famous internet dictum, if you have doubts about the integrity of a “whistleblower” making politically convenient bare assertions in an ideologically motivated forum, you really shouldn’t put any stock in their stories at all. Not even as a “starting point.”

Anyway, Colleen Schrappen has done some actual journalism about this story, and you can probably guess what she found:

Explosive allegations made public last month about a St. Louis clinic that treats transgender children have flung parents into a vortex of emotions: shock, confusion, anger, fear.

Kim Hutton, among those confused by the reports, views the treatment her son, now 19, received from Washington University’s Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital as vital to making him the outgoing college freshman he is today.

“The idea that nobody got information, that everybody was pushed toward treatment, is just not true. It’s devastating,” Hutton said. “I’m baffled by it.”

Almost two dozen parents of children seen at the clinic, which opened in 2017, say their experiences sharply contradict the examples supplied by Jamie Reed, a case manager who left the WU center after being employed there for more than four years. Reed outlined her concerns in an article published online Feb. 9; her sworn affidavit, which included additional allegations, was released that day by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, who is leading a state investigation.

There is, of course, the possibility of abuse or bad medical judgment at gender care clinics just as there is at any medical facility, but the rush to believe the worst at a time in which trans people are under severe political attack remains disturbing.