I read the article, The Liberal Misinformation Bubble About Youth Gender Medicine, How the Left Ended up Disbelieving the Science, by Helen Lewis, and as a licensed mental health professional who knows the harms of gender-affirming care up close and personal, I was cheering. However, the article was missing two critical pieces: the reasons this is happening and accountability.

While I appreciate Helen Lewis's analysis in The Atlantic, her article implies that ignoring the harms of gender-affirming care was an innocent oversight. On the other hand, I know that there has been an intentional effort to silence those who question the affirmation-only model, including myself. This is a nefarious effort by individuals who stand to gain significant power and wealth.

Helen Lewis, The Atlantic, and other mainstream media should be curious as to why medicalized transgender protocols have been encouraged despite the numerous and obvious shortfalls in evidence. Was it financial gain, ideology, or something more insidious? I hope Lewis and others are willing to look into it. All of the victims of gender medicine deserve justice and accountability from the leaders who pushed harmful ideas about gender and continue to silence those who lost so much to speak up against them.

The Atlantic article did a great job breaking down the junk science behind gender-affirming care. Still, it does not mention the aggressive silencing of prominent voices who had questions. To name a few: Erica Anderson was a doctor and the president of USWPATH from 2019 to 2021. Anderson stepped down when Anderson had concerns about the number of youth being fast-tracked into irreversible transgender medical procedures and received heavy pushback for that position. Erica is transgender.

I appreciated how Helen Lewis called out Marci Bowers, the doctor who is most well-known for doing the surgeries on 17-year-old Jazz Jennings on national TV, which ended with several complications. Bowers is also a trans person and a prominent figure in trans circles as president of the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) from 2022 to 2024. Lewis mentions how Bowers pushed the idea that "trans children" need puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries desperately and compared withholding them to the Holocaust. Despite this extreme claim, Bowers stated that puberty blockers are harmful. Bowers was recorded saying that any child put on blockers at Tanner stage 2 will never be able to achieve orgasm, ever. That video is still up on YouTube. How can a video like this exist and be so easily accessible without raising any questions from major institutions?

I also cheered the exposure of Dr. Johana Olson-Kennedy, the medical director of The Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children's Hospital Los Angeles since 2012. Back in 2012, in their series, Living a Transgender Childhood, NBC journalist Hoda Kotb innocently asked how 12, 13, or 14 years could decide their fertility future, and Olson-Kennedy manipulatively shut her down by saying, "Well, they make the decision to kill themselves at 12 and 13, that's a powerful decision." In the same video, Olson-Kennedy admits that there is no data to determine who will benefit from life-altering medicalization. She states, "What's missing in the data right now is these exact characteristics mean that this person is for sure going to be a trans adolescent and adult. We don't have that data."

In addition, there is a viral video of Olson-Kennedy saying people can go and get new breasts if they have regret, she is facing a lawsuit by a former patient, and she hid essential results from a $10 million NIH-funded study on puberty blockers and mental health outcomes. Yet, she remains the lead gender doctor at LA Children's Hospital and is the president-elect of USWPATH.

As a California-licensed therapist, I attended a training luncheon led by Olson-Kennedy and hosted by the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists (CAMFT) in May 2023, where she claimed that puberty blockers are as reversible as toy preferences, clothing style, and a new haircut. She even described the surgery as "partially reversible." In the end, I asked about the scientific validity of the suicide ultimatum, and she quoted studies that have weak methods and findings, similar to what The Atlantic cites. There was no time for a debate, so she had the last word, relying on her credentials and authority to convince hundreds of mental health professionals to believe that youth need to transition or die.

At the same conference, I attended another training led by Linda Reeves, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and a WPATH-trained clinician who taught therapists how to manipulate skeptical parents to affirm their gender-questioning youth. She described gender-affirming care as "getting 'em on the bus." Reeves went so far as to instruct the room of therapists to use child protective services to strong-arm parents into making life-long medical decisions for their children that would entail sterilization and a cascade of health issues. I raised my hand and asked how we could be certain this was the right decision for the children, and she couldn't answer. Once again, I was the only one in that room questioning these ideas.

Prominent Canadian psychologist Kenneth Zucker lost his gender clinic when he expressed his belief in a "watchful waiting" approach. Zucker was so high-status in the gender circle that he was part of the committee that formulated the criteria for Gender Dysphoria in the DSM-5. Anderson and Zucker were both established experts in the gender medicine field and were not any version of a "right-wing extremist." However, they were discarded when they became a threat to the establishment that had something to gain.

I was part of a group that attended the September 2024 American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) conference to share the many facts that The Atlantic article laid out, including the lack of data on the gender transitioning of minors. The Biden Administration's US Secretary of Health, Rachel Levine, who pushed for removing barriers to childhood medical transition, was the keynote speaker of the event. Our group, which consisted of professionals and patients who had been harmed, was respectful and truthful. We consulted with several doctors who had concerns about the protocols for addressing gender issues. Despite this, we were kicked out with no explanation. No AAP official came to speak to us or try to listen. Instead, security came to escort us out the back door.

I know too many people who have had their lives torn apart by damage from hormones and surgeries. These people include both those who continue to identify as trans and those who have regrets. I've had the opportunity to hear them speak, spend time with them one-on-one, and provide them with professional counseling. People argue that it doesn't matter because regret is rare. However, there is no way of tallying their numbers since there is no medical code to track regret, and most of them do not return to the medical system that betrayed them. Even if they are "rare," that doesn't matter. The physical and emotional damage to people who take puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and get gender surgeries is the furthest thing from life-saving care. While the medical profession takes an oath not to harm, the proponents of gender medicine pushed full steam ahead to do MUCH harm.

Pamela Garfield-Jaeger is a licensed therapist with 25 years of experience. She is the author of A Practical Response to Gender Distress, available on Amazon, and Froggy Girl, a children’s book about self-acceptance, available on July 15, 2025. Pre-order on: www.froggygirlbook. Pamela has also written a three-credit professional course for other professionals to learn the truth about gender medicine practices and holistic ways to help patients and their families with gender distress.