Scarfolk is a town in North West England that did not progress beyond 1979. Instead, the entire decade of the 1970s loops ad infinitum. Here in Scarfolk, pagan rituals blend seamlessly with science; hauntology is a compulsory subject at school, and everyone must be in bed by 8pm because they are perpetually running a slight fever. "Visit Scarfolk today. Our number one priority is keeping rabies at bay." For more information please reread.

Blog I stumbled across the pond that had me (I'm sure BIAD knows of this palace of laughter)

Quote:Identified Flying Objects (& Esoteric Truth)

In the 1970s, the distinction between fact and fiction completely broke down as a result of years of government fabrications, corporate deceit, media falsehoods and systematic educational disinformation.



Objective truth gained an esoteric, almost occult status along with subjects such as ghosts, bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, pagan paediatrics and other unexplained phenomena. Many didn't believe that objective truth even existed.

The dwindling numbers of people who insisted that real facts were 'out there' were pushed to the fringes of society and labelled conspiracy theorists. They saw it as their duty to promote even the most rudimentary facts and reintroduce them into the public arena.



One area of so-called "arcane knowledge" concerned IFOs (Identified Flying Objects), which eventually caught the public imagination, or rather the lack of it. Sensationalised books and magazines about the topic flooded newsagents and bookshops (see pages above and below from The IFO Phenomenon (Corgi, 1977) and a pull-poster from IFO Monthly magazine). By the end of the decade, many people claimed to have had a "close encounter" with an IFO. Some even reported that they had been taken aboard such craft.



For more information about the suppression of facts in public discourse, see the Truth Reform Act of 1976 and mandatory de-education classes.

Quote:The Fact Ban (1976)



In 1975 the government discreetly tortured citizens to find out what they thought of its leadership. The results revealed that many participants thought the state "cheerfully totalitarian","despotic, but in a nice way", and "I'll say anything you want as long as you stop waterboarding me and give me back my eye."

The government sensed a need for change and announced that it would be introducing more liberal attitudes to its policies, particularly those relating to facts and information.

Facts had always been problematic for the government because of their inflexibility. Though the use of facts in state administration was strongly disparaged and had largely been expunged from political life, some civil servants stubbornly refused to yield to inexplicable reversals in party policy.

An internal council memo to employees read: "Facts do not serve the best interests of a successful government and we must not permit them to hinder our healthy economy with their tyrannical, oppressive insistence on what is and isn't true. If you must employ a truth, ensure that you are liberal with it -  untamed, unedited facts can be dangerous in the wrong hands. Ideally, you will create your own facts so that you can retain control of them."

In early 1976, as part of its Truth Reform, the government went a step further and initiated an all-out ban on unsanctioned facts, as can be seen from the above council leaflet distributed to employees. Until the end of the decade all facts were created and authorised by a new governmental department called the Fact Office or F-OFF for short.

Quote:Mandatory De-education Classes



Post-Truthism is nothing new. Following the Truth Reform Act of 1976, it became every citizen's civic duty to attend de-education classes. The state instinctively felt that knowledge and the educated people who wield it destablize governmental plans, especially those that routinely and deliberately disregard verifiable facts.

According to one de-education textbook: "A good or 'Schrödinger' fact is simultaneously true and untrue until such a time that someone in authority tells you which, though they may change their mind or substitute the fact entirely for another piece of information, fabricated or otherwise, that suits their personal or political needs."

It could take many years for a citizen to unlearn everything, particularly because they first had to learn the complex method of how to unlearn. (Also see the How to Burn Books book).

Additionally, because de-education classes were compulsory (and expensive), some people opted instead for lobotomies by backstreet barber-surgeons, who, it was later revealed, received government funding. These unregistered practitioners would lay their patients' heads on the bottom step of a staircase, then release a Slinky attached to a sledgehammer from the top step. If this procedure was unsuccessful, they would force the patients to binge-watch ITV talent shows such as Opportunity Knocks or the BBC's Come Dancing programme.

Quote:Confirmation Bias Goggles (1970)



Confirmation Bias Goggles were the first wearable technology to be wired directly into the brain. In addition to the pinhead-sized speaker which perpetually broadcast the statement 'Of course you're right!' into the auditory cortex, the goggles sensors could also switch off those parts of the brain that deal with troublesome emotions and feelings such as empathy, decency and healthy scepticism.

By tapping into the wearer's biases, the goggles literally deleted undesirable objects from the wearer's field of vision. Sights that were too dominant to be erased completely were visually falsified to validate the wearer's preconceptions.

By 1971, the state had adapted the goggles for use in schools. Children were told precisely what to think and what their personal opinions as adults would be. Unsurprisingly, everybody who tried the goggles, without exception, thought that they were a great idea. Each set comes with a free lifetime subscription to Cognitive Dissonance.

Quote:"Children: The Cause of All Crime"

In 1970 the Scarfolk Crime Commission embarked on the largest study into crime to date. After two years of intense investigation it found a startling correlation between the types of people who commit crime and their early life experiences.



The findings were unequivocal: 100% of criminals had also once been children.

The council immediately put into effect acts intended to reduce, if not entirely eradicate this insidious cause of crime. Thousands of children were rounded up in camps. Toys were burnt in massive pyres. Adults were sterilised. Anyone who had been in regular contact with children, or had ever been a child, was quarantined in vast bunkers specially built several storeys below the council building.

Though Scarfolk was reduced to a ghost town, the scheme proved a success. During the first month that these stringent measures had been implemented not one crime had been committed. Consequently, at the 1972 Conference of Sham Utopias, a local conservative MP predicted that the most successful towns, and even countries, of the future will be those that eradicate all citizens who have any connection to, or dealings with, children or the adults they grow into.

Quote:Memory Chemicals (1979)

The campaign and treatments were so effective that some people became inexplicably afraid not only to go outside but also to not go into rooms in their own homes in case they saw or overheard something forbidden.



Those who could still manage to venture into rooms immediately forgot why they were there and, following a deluge of confused calls to the authorities, they had to be reminded that they had forgotten, and should now forget that they had remembered that they had forgotten.

Quote:'Allclear' Open-Air Nuclear Bunkers

In 1971 the government's civil defence budget was slashed. Local councils limited their building of conventional nuclear bunkers and focused instead on cheaper alternatives, for the general populace anyway.



From government public information literature:

"Though secure, Britain's existing nuclear bunkers are cramped and do not offer the comforts of home living. Built from drab, uninspiring concrete, they are brazenly unaesthetic and because they lack natural light, occupiers risk becoming fed up during their stay.

"Government officials, royals and the independently wealthy have courteously opted to endure these cheerless conditions so that you don't have to*.

"We think that you and your family deserve more agreeable accommodation when that 4-Minute Warning jingle sounds.

"Enter ALLCLEAR, the government's new post-nuclear solution for YOU. ALLCLEAR Open-Air Bunkers are easily erected in approx. 60 minutes. They are light, airy and available in a choice of fun colours: orange or yellowy-red. They even come with their own FREE power-string, velcro all-seasons flap and a multipurpose stick [...]

"*Please note that any attempt to secure a place in a traditional concrete bunker (and in doing so compromise the well-intended benevolence of the above mentioned persons) will be rejected with extreme prejudice."

Things that make ya go hmmmm  

I was floored when the JunoCam returned our first video ever taken of it's approach to Jupiter and it's Moons!

I had to create a video of it straight away! It was like looking out the Enterprise Observation Lounge.
 

The legendary Art Bell is a great example of why you shouldn't become famous for weird stuff..unless you have the cajones to persevere. His FBI file is full of death threats, stalkers, and people faking chat logs to frame him for slandering the Phillipines.

FBI FOIA file on Art Bell released (from that Black Vault guy; with plenty of redactions) Also, some files on the one & only William "Bill" Cooper.

The FBI redaction code "b5" means: inter-agency or intra-agency memorandums or letters which would not be available by law to a party other than an agency in litigation with the agency. The other codes apply to personal and/or agent privacy info, you know like "names & places."

Little known factoid: I had lived ~17 miles away from Art Bell's compound in Nevada.

Art Bell used to make reference to a phenomena he called "The Quickening" (tribute to the movie "Highlander"), a phenomena that would send all of humanity across the threshold of a complete paradigm shift. I'd say that shift has arrived and currently ongoing!

In 1997 he published a book titled The Quickening: Today's Trends, Tomorrow's World

Quote:In the past, advances in technology have served as the impetus for far-reaching change; we are propelled forward, and our lives are changed forever. Technology is the difference between where we are now and the path not taken. Not only is technology an important example of how aspects of the Quickening overlap and affect each other, much like a patchwork quilt, but technology is the core of the Quickening.

Indeed you can see that the boundaries of the aspects of the Quickening are blurred; here you have seen that technology affects the way we behave in society, it affects our global safety, it affects our political ties, and much more. We can look forward to astounding numbers of technological advances in the very near future. For the "Millennium Generation" and beyond, the sky will be the limit. At any rate, you should take a good look at the world around you because it won't be the same when you wake up tomorrow.

The Quickening - Chapter 1

There has not always been a "grid" to live on, but folks managed to survive anyhow. This thread is meant to be a repository of knowledge from long-ago times, times when one could not just hop in the car and run to the grocery store. Times when travel was on foot, or at best horseback. Times when your main resources were within walking distance - but "walking distance" in those days spread a bit farther afield than it does now. It just took longer to cover it.

The idea for the thread came from Bally002, in a shoutbox discussion. He's building what we called here a "root cellar", and since I grew up with root cellars, smoke houses, spring houses, etc. I offered some input, which I will reformat and post in this thread for posterity.

My Dear Old Dad insisted that I learn how to live by the Old Ways, because he always said the time may come when I'd have to be able to do for myself, because there might not be anyone available to hire for it. He said grocery stores were "a new thing that might not last", and I'd have to be able to work around it if none were available.

So we raised a garden, and we raised critters... and sometimes the two intertwined. For example, we plowed the garden and cultivated it with horses rather than a tractor. Horses burn hay, don't need a gasoline delivery. You get the fuel for them right out of the pasture. That can be handy when supply chains collapse or inflation prices commodities out of reach.

We also used the horses to fertilize the garden. One of my chores was mucking out the stalls and spreading fresh straw on the floor of them. I'd throw that mixed straw and horse manure into a manure pile ( I think they call it a "compost pile" these days), and let it set there to rot down When it got ripe, we'd use a half-sole sled (which we also built) drawn by the horses to haul the fertilizer out to the garden, then plow it under and let it work over winter to enrich the ground for the next spring's crop.

Funny thing about those manure piles - they get HOT as it breaks down. You can watch steam rise from them on cold mornings, and I've seen them bare of snow after a snow storm because of the heat they generated. You had to pile it a fair distance from the barn, because pap swore it could get hot enough to set a barn on fire and kill all your stock... and that would put you back to square one. We built our own barn, but we didn't want to have to build a second one and restock it.

We built a small blacksmithing forge, and dad did the farrier's work of shoeing the horses himself.

We kept some stock, but not a wide variety. For example, we never raised cattle, so I know jack shit about cattle raising. We kept chickens and ducks, hogs and horses... and of course the obligatory predators, like cats and dogs, for hunting and pest control. There were a lot of other folks who raised cattle around here back then, so we could always trade for any cow-products we needed. Now most of the cattle are gone, and folks have taken to raising goats in the area where I grew up. The cattle kept the pastures clear, and now that they are absent, the cedar has retaken the land and grown a forest where I remember pasture being. So I reckon those goats may come in handy now.

Back in the day, a few folks raised goats, but it was hard to keep them in. They'd get out and go feral. River Mountain had a population of feral goats on it, which some of us thought was great - you could hunt them and eat them just like a deer, but there was no goat hunting season to get in the way.

Bally002, I believe, also has a farm section on almost the exactly opposite side of Earth from me, and has input from there to include as well.

So this thread is to be a "how to" repository of knowledge for hard times. You never know when they are coming, as Dear Old Dad always stressed to me - he grew up in the Great Depression, and was insistent that I be able to fend for myself since he knew all too well how easily it can happen to anyone.

If you have knowledge to add - and I know there are some of you out there who do - please feel free. It'd not a Ninurta thread or a Bally002 thread, it's a ROGUE thread. Something you know may help someone along in hard times of their own, so toss it here in the compendium!

I'll be making more posts with more information as time rolls on and I get them edited. You can, too!

.

thought i post some of the best one hit wonders. stopped at the 90's cause as mr. segar said years ago, today's music ain't got the same sole.

so feel free to post your favorite one hit wonders, god knows there are a bunch of them out there and some of them from bands we all know.

here's one that the back story is true and cool. the band was a hard rock cover bar band during the disco days doing one night stands. they were finding it hard to get gigs, so the the leader of the band told the members that they were going to have to start playing dance music if they wanted to work and get paid, they didn't want to and kept on playing the clubs as a cover band. one night in at a club in Pittsburgh, where the audience was mostly black , during a break a somebody came up and asked, "Are you going to play some funky music, white boys?". Parissi grabbed a pen and order pad and wrote the sonf in 5 minutes. the song hit # 1 on the bill board and soul charts in 76 and was voted 93rd on the top 100 billboards greats hits in 2018, and has sold 2.5 million in the U.S. alone.





decided to post this in kinda keepin in the cross over idea and this is a one hit wonder. i also like the way this guy bugs out when he hears a tune he likes, and doesn't like.plus some of the stuff he comes up with is funny. his older ones are better then the newer ones and his Reaction on some other things aren't that great. but all ands all he seems fairly cool.

This Voyage was created using Hubble images.

https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/what-...-know-that

Quote:What funeral directors know that you don't
In 78 years, they never had a 15 year old who died from a heart attack. In December 2022, they had 1 a week for three weeks straight. Nobody is talking about it publicly.

Steve Kirsch


17 hr ago



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Few funeral directors are saying anything. I just talked to the owner of a large number of funeral homes in the US. They know what is going on, but are not going to say anything publicly.
Executive summary

Ever since the vaccines rolled out, deaths are up, particularly among young people.
I talked to the owner of many funeral homes across the US; collectively they handle over 3,000 funerals a year. He asked that his name be kept confidential for fear of retribution.
Overall, their business is up by 50% after the vaccines rolled out and it’s not proportional… young people are a greater portion of the deaths.
For example pilot deaths at Southwest Airlines are up six-fold after the vaccines were mandated.
My source said that normally they’d see 1 stillbirth/month pre-vaccine. After the vaccines rolled out, they were seeing as many as 12 stillbirths a month. But they noted that many hospitals will dispose of these cases directly and NOT involve the funeral home, so they are only seeing a fraction of these deaths; the actual increase could be much larger than the 12X increase they observed.
In the 78 years they’ve been in business, they can’t recall ever having seen a 15-year old die from a heart attack. In December 2022, they had 1 a week for three weeks straight.
A very experienced nurse I consulted had never even heard of a 15-year old with a heart attack in her entire career. Now, she hears of these cases on a regular basis.
These funeral homes are also seeing the strange rubbery clots that they’ve never seen before.
The medical examiner was called and verified it, but nobody is saying anything publicly for fear of being fired.
Basically, ever since 2021, they have been seeing very strange things: stillbirths, number of “found dead,” healthy people having heart attacks and strokes, blood clots, etc. They’ve never seen anything like that before; it’s a “noticeable” difference.
Like most funeral homes, they don’t tally statistics but they remember the anecdotes. The most noticeable thing is that the events are happening disproportionally to younger people (i.e., people under 65).
So if elderly deaths are only up by 15%, but younger age groups are increased by 100% or more, the overall all-cause mortality for all ages will only increase modestly (since younger people rarely die).
Also, the CDC stats for 2022 say that the data is not fully reported due to reporting delays. This means checking with funeral directors is a way to estimate what is happening in real-time.
Bottom line: everyone knows what is causing this, but they are all afraid to speak out. For the few who do speak out, their stories are never covered in the mainstream media.
If kids dying of heart attacks are up by 100X over normal, why aren’t we seeing it in the all-cause mortality stats for young people?

It’s simple… kids under 16 dying from heart attacks pre-vax is nearly 0. So even after a 100X increase, it’s still a negligible number compared to overall all-cause child deaths (from accidents, cancer, etc).
So this is why you can have dramatic increases in key categories of death, even though the all-cause death rates for the larger category aren’t significantly increased.
However, despite this, the most important thing is the all-cause mortality numbers for everyone, and those are still up, which is very unusual as noted here.
Petition for the FAA to investigate 6X increase in pilot deaths

Pilot deaths at Southwest airlines used to average 1 or 2 a year. Now they are dying at a rate of around 1 a month.
Mike Gollins tried to get signatures on a petition to the FAA to investigate these deaths, but found that even though people agree this is important to investigate, they were too afraid to sign the petition:







[url=https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8282ad58-337a-4418-94c5-4ce89f734c7f_750x1000.png]
Mike Gollins trying to gather signatures. People agree, but are afraid to sign.
Update on the Medicare data I talked about

I hope to have something in the next few days. I want to make sure the data is reliable. Stay tuned. I’ve been spending a lot of time on this work which is why I haven’t been publishing new content for a few days.
Summary

We have anecdotal evidence that the vaccines are causing great harm:

• Stillbirths up by over 10X post-vax rollout.
  
• Pilot deaths are up by 6X or more.
  
• Young people (such as 15 year olds) dying of heart attacks are up by over 100X above normal.
  

The mainstream medical community will continue to remain silent in order to keep their jobs. Not a single one will ask for the data transparency (exposing correlated death-vaccine records) that would enable the truth to be revealed.
Basically, the medical community believes that we need to keep the data hidden and kept from public view; otherwise, they would be fired (or lose their medical license).
Also, if the data was made public, people would find out the truth and lose faith in the medical community. If people lost trust in their doctors, they wouldn’t follow their advice to take the vaccine anymore. We can’t have that!
That’s how science works today.

https://www.thefp.com/p/i-thought-i-was-...trans-kids

Quote:I Thought I Was Saving Trans Kids. Now I’m Blowing the Whistle.
There are more than 100 pediatric gender clinics across the U.S. I worked at one. What’s happening to children is morally and medically appalling.

By Jamie Reed
February 9, 2023

Quote:I am a 42-year-old St. Louis native, a queer woman, and politically to the left of Bernie Sanders. My worldview has deeply shaped my career. I have spent my professional life providing counseling to vulnerable populations: children in foster care, sexual minorities, the poor. 
For almost four years, I worked at The Washington University School of Medicine Division of Infectious Diseases with teens and young adults who were HIV positive. Many of them were trans or otherwise gender nonconforming, and I could relate: Through childhood and adolescence, I did a lot of gender questioning myself. I’m now married to a transman, and together we are raising my two biological children from a previous marriage and three foster children we hope to adopt. 
All that led me to a job in 2018 as a case manager at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital, which had been established a year earlier. 
The center’s working assumption was that the earlier you treat kids with gender dysphoria, the more anguish you can prevent later on. This premise was shared by the center’s doctors and therapists. Given their expertise, I assumed that abundant evidence backed this consensus. 
During the four years I worked at the clinic as a case manager—I was responsible for patient intake and oversight—around a thousand distressed young people came through our doors. The majority of them received hormone prescriptions that can have life-altering consequences—including sterility. 
I left the clinic in November of last year because I could no longer participate in what was happening there. By the time I departed, I was certain that the way the American medical system is treating these patients is the opposite of the promise we make to “do no harm.” Instead, we are permanently harming the vulnerable patients in our care.
Today I am speaking out. I am doing so knowing how toxic the public conversation is around this highly contentious issue—and the ways that my testimony might be misused. I am doing so knowing that I am putting myself at serious personal and professional risk.
Almost everyone in my life advised me to keep my head down. But I cannot in good conscience do so. Because what is happening to scores of children is far more important than my comfort. And what is happening to them is morally and medically appalling.
[/url]



Reed in her office. (Theo R. Welling).
The Floodgates Open
Soon after my arrival at the Transgender Center, I was struck by the lack of formal protocols for treatment. The center’s physician co-directors were essentially the sole authority.
At first, the patient population was tipped toward what used to be the “traditional” instance of a child with gender dysphoria: a boy, often quite young, who wanted to present as—who wanted to be—a girl. 
Until 2015 or so, a very small number of these boys comprised the population of pediatric gender dysphoria cases. Then, across the Western world, there began to be a dramatic increase in a new population: Teenage girls, many with no previous history of gender distress, suddenly declared they were transgender and demanded immediate treatment with testosterone. 
I certainly saw this at the center. One of my jobs was to do intake for new patients and their families. When I started there were probably 10 such calls a month. When I left there were 50, and about 70 percent of the new patients were girls. Sometimes clusters of girls arrived from the same high school. 
This concerned me, but didn’t feel I was in the position to sound some kind of alarm back then. There was a team of about eight of us, and only one other person brought up the kinds of questions I had. Anyone who raised doubts ran the risk of being called a transphobe. 
The girls who came to us had many comorbidities: depression, anxiety, ADHD, eating disorders, obesity. Many were diagnosed with autism, or had autism-like symptoms. A report last year on a British pediatric transgender center found that about one-third of the patients referred there were on the autism spectrum.
Frequently, our patients declared they had disorders that no one believed they had. We had patients who said they had Tourette syndrome (but they didn’t); that they had tic disorders (but they didn’t); that they had multiple personalities (but they didn’t). 
The doctors privately recognized these false self-diagnoses as a manifestation of social contagion. They even acknowledged that suicide has an element of social contagion. But when I said the clusters of girls streaming into our service looked as if their gender issues might be a manifestation of social contagion, the doctors said gender identity reflected something innate.
To begin transitioning, the girls needed a letter of support from a therapist—usually one we recommended—who they had to see only once or twice for the green light. To make it more efficient for the therapists, we offered them a template for how to write a letter in support of transition. The next stop was a single visit to the endocrinologist for a testosterone prescription. 
That’s all it took. 
When a female takes testosterone, the profound and permanent effects of the hormone can be seen in a matter of months. Voices drop, beards sprout, body fat is redistributed. Sexual interest explodes, aggression increases, and mood can be unpredictable. Our patients were told about some side effects, including sterility. But after working at the center, I came to believe that teenagers are simply not capable of fully grasping what it means to make the decision to become infertile while still a minor. 
Side Effects
Many encounters with patients emphasized to me how little these young people understood the profound impacts changing gender would have on their bodies and minds. But the center downplayed the negative consequences, and emphasized the need for transition. As the center’s website said, “Left untreated, gender dysphoria has any number of consequences, from self-harm to suicide. But when you take away the gender dysphoria by allowing a child to be who he or she is, we’re noticing that goes away. The studies we have show these kids often wind up functioning psychosocially as well as or better than their peers.” 
There are no reliable studies showing this. Indeed, the experiences of many of the center’s patients prove how false these assertions are. 
Here’s an example. On Friday, May 1, 2020, a colleague emailed me about a 15-year-old male patient: “Oh dear. I am concerned that [the patient] does not understand what Bicalutamide does.” I responded: “I don’t think that we start anything honestly right now.”




Bicalutamide is a medication used to treat metastatic prostate cancer, and one of its side effects is that it feminizes the bodies of men who take it, including the appearance of breasts. The center prescribed this cancer drug as a puberty blocker and feminizing agent for boys. As with most cancer drugs, bicalutamide has a long list of side effects, and this patient experienced one of them: liver toxicity. He was sent to another unit of the hospital for evaluation and immediately taken off the drug. Afterward, his mother sent an electronic message to the Transgender Center saying that we were lucky her family was not the type to sue.
How little patients understood what they were getting into was illustrated by a call we received at the center in 2020 from a 17-year-old biological female patient who was on testosterone. She said she was bleeding from the vagina. In less than an hour she had soaked through an extra heavy pad, her jeans, and a towel she had wrapped around her waist. The nurse at the center told her to go to the emergency room right away.
We found out later this girl had had intercourse, and because testosterone thins the vaginal tissues, her vaginal canal had ripped open. She had to be sedated and given surgery to repair the damage. She wasn’t the only vaginal laceration case we heard about.
Other girls were disturbed by the effects of testosterone on their clitoris, which enlarges and grows into what looks like a microphallus, or a tiny penis. I counseled one patient whose enlarged clitoris now extended below her vulva, and it chafed and rubbed painfully in her jeans. I advised her to get the kind of compression undergarments worn by biological men who dress to pass as female. At the end of the call I thought to myself, “Wow, we hurt this kid.” 
There are rare conditions in which babies are born with atypical genitalia—cases that call for sophisticated care and compassion. But clinics like the one where I worked are creating a whole cohort of kids with atypical genitals—and most of these teens haven’t even had sex yet. They had no idea who they were going to be as adults. Yet all it took for them to permanently transform themselves was one or two short conversations with a therapist.
Being put on powerful doses of testosterone or estrogen—enough to try to trick your body into mimicking the opposite sex—-affects the rest of the body. I doubt that any parent who's ever consented to give their kid testosterone (a lifelong treatment) knows that they’re also possibly signing their kid up for blood pressure medication, cholesterol medication, and perhaps sleep apnea and diabetes. 
But sometimes the parents’ understanding of what they had agreed to do to their children came forcefully: 




Neglected and Mentally Ill Patients
Besides teenage girls, another new group was referred to us: young people from the inpatient psychiatric unit, or the emergency department, of St. Louis Children’s Hospital. The mental health of these kids was deeply concerning—there were diagnoses like schizophrenia, PTSD, bipolar disorder, and more. Often they were already on a fistful of pharmaceuticals.
This was tragic, but unsurprising given the profound trauma some had been through. Yet no matter how much suffering or pain a child had endured, or how little treatment and love they had received, our doctors viewed gender transition—even with all the expense and hardship it entailed—as the solution.
Some weeks it felt as though almost our entire caseload was nothing but disturbed young people. 
For example, one teenager came to us in the summer of 2022 when he was 17 years old and living in a lockdown facility because he had been sexually abusing dogs. He’d had an awful childhood: His mother was a drug addict, his father was imprisoned, and he grew up in foster care. Whatever treatment he may have been getting, it wasn’t working. 
During our intake I learned from another caseworker that when he got out, he planned to reoffend because he believed the dogs had willingly submitted.
Somewhere along the way, he expressed a desire to become female, so he ended up being seen at our center. From there, he went to a psychologist at the hospital who was known to approve virtually everyone seeking transition. Then our doctor recommended feminizing hormones. At the time, I wondered if this was being done as a form of chemical castration. 
That same thought came up again with another case. This one was in spring of 2022 and concerned a young man who had intense obsessive-compulsive disorder that manifested as a desire to cut off his penis after he masturbated. This patient expressed no gender dysphoria, but he got hormones, too. I asked the doctor what protocol he was following, but I never got a straight answer. 
In Loco Parentis
Another disturbing aspect of the center was its lack of regard for the rights of parents—and the extent to which doctors saw themselves as more informed decision-makers over the fate of these children.
In Missouri, only one parent’s consent is required for treatment of their child. But when there was a dispute between the parents, it seemed the center always took the side of the affirming parent.
My concerns about this approach to dissenting parents grew in 2019 when one of our doctors actually testified in a custody hearing against a father who opposed a mother’s wish to start their 11-year-old daughter on puberty blockers. 
I had done the original intake call, and I found the mother quite disturbing. She and the father were getting divorced, and the mother described the daughter as “kind of a tomboy.” So now the mother was convinced her child was trans. But when I asked if her daughter had adopted a boy’s name, if she was distressed about her body, if she was saying she felt like a boy, the mother said no. I explained the girl just didn’t meet the criteria for an evaluation. 
Then a month later, the mother called back and said her daughter now used a boy’s name, was in distress over her body, and wanted to transition. This time the mom and daughter were given an appointment. Our providers decided the girl was trans and prescribed a puberty blocker to prevent her normal development. 
The father adamantly disagreed, said this was all coming from the mother, and a custody battle ensued. After the hearing where our doctor testified in favor of transition, the judge sided with the mother. 




‘I Want My Breasts Back’
Because I was the main intake person, I had the broadest perspective on our existing and prospective patients. In 2019, a new group of people appeared on my radar: desisters and detransitioners. Desisters choose not to go through with a transition. Detransitioners are transgender people who decide to return to their birth gender. 
The one colleague with whom I was able to share my concerns agreed with me that we should be tracking desistance and detransition. We thought the doctors would want to collect and understand this data in order to figure out what they had missed. 
We were wrong. One doctor wondered aloud why he would spend time on someone who was no longer his patient. 
But we created a document anyway and called it the Red Flag list. It was an Excel spreadsheet that tracked the kind of patients that kept my colleague and me up at night. 
One of the saddest cases of detransition I witnessed was a teenage girl, who, like so many of our patients, came from an unstable family, was in an uncertain living situation, and had a history of drug use. The overwhelming majority of our patients are white, but this girl was black. She was put on hormones at the center when she was around 16. When she was 18, she went in for a double mastectomy, what’s known as “top surgery.” 
Three months later she called the surgeon’s office to say she was going back to her birth name and that her pronouns were “she” and “her.” Heartbreakingly, she told the nurse, “I want my breasts back.” The surgeon’s office contacted our office because they didn’t know what to say to this girl.
My colleague and I said that we would reach out. It took a while to track her down, and when we did we made sure that she was in decent mental health, that she was not actively suicidal, that she was not using substances. The last I heard, she was pregnant. Of course, she’ll never be able to breastfeed her child. 
‘Get On Board, Or Get Out’
My concerns about what was going on at the center started to overtake my life. By spring 2020, I felt a medical and moral obligation to do something. So I spoke up in the office, and sent plenty of emails. 
Here’s just one example: On January 6, 2022, I received an email from a staff therapist asking me for help with a case of a 16-year-old transgender male living in another state. “Parents are open to having patient see a therapist but are not supportive of gender and patient does not want parents to be aware of gender identity. I am having a challenging time finding a gender affirming therapist.”
I replied:
“I do not ethically agree with linking a minor patient to a therapist who would be gender affirming with gender as a focus of their work without that being discussed with the parents and the parent agreeing to that kind of care.”





In all my years at the Washington University School of Medicine, I had received solidly positive performance reviews. But in 2021, that changed. I got a below-average mark for my “Judgment” and “Working Relationships/Cooperative Spirit.” Although I was described as “responsible, conscientious, hard-working and productive” the evaluation also noted: “At times Jamie responds poorly to direction from management with defensiveness and hostility.” 
Things came to a head at a half-day retreat in summer of 2022. In front of the team, the doctors said that my colleague and I had to stop questioning the “medicine and the science” as well as their authority. Then an administrator told us we had to “Get on board, or get out.” It became clear that the purpose of the retreat was to deliver these messages to us.
The Washington University system provides a generous college tuition payment program for long-standing employees. I live by my paycheck and have no money to put aside for five college tuitions for my kids. I had to keep my job. I also feel a lot of loyalty to Washington University.
But I decided then and there that I had to get out of the Transgender Center, and to do so, I had to keep my head down and improve my next performance review. 
I managed to get a decent evaluation, and I landed a job conducting research in another part of The Washington University School of Medicine. I gave my notice and left the Transgender Center in November of 2022. 



[url=https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0a40ab5f-4983-4799-98e3-386307789fd4_3000x2000.jpeg]
(Theo R. Welling)
What I Want to See Happen
For a couple of weeks, I tried to put everything behind me and settled into my new job as a clinical research coordinator, managing studies regarding children undergoing bone marrow transplants. 
Then I came across comments from Dr. Rachel Levine, a transgender woman who is a high official at the federal Department of Health and Human Services. The article read: “Levine, the U.S. assistant secretary for health, said that clinics are proceeding carefully and that no American children are receiving drugs or hormones for gender dysphoria who shouldn’t.”
I felt stunned and sickened. It wasn’t true. And I know that from deep first-hand experience. 
So I started writing down everything I could about my experience at the Transgender Center. Two weeks ago, I brought my concerns and documents to the attention of Missouri’s attorney general. He is a Republican. I am a progressive. But the safety of children should not be a matter for our culture wars. 
Click here to read Jamie Reed’s letter to the Missouri AG.
Given the secrecy and lack of rigorous standards that characterize youth gender transition across the country, I believe that to ensure the safety of American children, we need a moratorium on the hormonal and surgical treatment of young people with gender dysphoria. 
In the past 15 years, according to Reuters, the U.S. has gone from having no pediatric gender clinics to more than 100. A thorough analysis should be undertaken to find out what has been done to their patients and why—and what the long-term consequences are.
There is a clear path for us to follow. Just last year England announced that it would close the Tavistock’s youth gender clinic, then the NHS’s only such clinic in the country, after an investigation revealed shoddy practices and poor patient treatment. Sweden and Finland, too, have investigated pediatric transition and greatly curbed the practice, finding there is insufficient evidence of help, and danger of great harm. 
Some critics describe the kind of treatment offered at places like the Transgender Center where I worked as a kind of national experiment. But that’s wrong. 
Experiments are supposed to be carefully designed. Hypotheses are supposed to be tested ethically. The doctors I worked alongside at the Transgender Center said frequently about the treatment of our patients: “We are building the plane while we are flying it.” No one should be a passenger on that kind of aircraft.