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.”

It turns out Kim Hutton is a lot more than just a stunned parent.

The “baffled” line was compelling enough that it was integrated into the article’s headline. But Colleen Schrappen, the article’s author, doesn’t note that Kim Hutton is the cofounder of TransParent, a group that advocates for trans kids and their access to medical treatment.

That, alone, is poor reporting: as a journalist, of course you should disclose relevant activist ties on the part of any source you quote. If you quote someone saying they’re really concerned about out of control police violence, and you don’t disclose that they have been an active member of Black Lives Matter for five years, that’s bad…

But in this case, the undisclosed conflicts are even more severe: not only is Hutton the cofounder of TransParent, but she actually helped create the very gender center being scrutinized. A savvy tipster, who wanted to remain anonymous, pointed this out to me in an email. TransParent’s History page details close links between Hutton and St. Louis Children’s Hospital going back more than a decade. In a 2018 article in the Ladue News informing readers of 2018’s “Women of Achievement,” the author writes that among her other accomplishments, Hutton “successfully lobbied for the Washington University Transgender Center of Excellence, which opened in 2017.” Hutton herself echoed that claim in a sworn deposition contained in this 2017 legal filing (page 175 in the PDF). The details of the case don’t matter for our purposes, but Hutton testified about someone else having been “well aware that Dr. Abby Hollander was working with me, or that I had approached her about starting a pediatric gender center inside the hospital” (Hollander is a pediatric endocrinologist at St. Louis Children’s).

That’s a hell of an omission. It’s like reporting that public school parent Randi Weingarten was stunned at allegations about bad behavior by public school unions. If you leave out that Randi Weingarten runs the unions, you’re clearly hiding the ball from readers.

Another person quoted at length in the Post-Dispatch story was Jess Jones. Jones, who said he worked with Reed, claimed she often misgendered trans people on purpose. Jones concluded Reed’s behavior “was the primary reason I left.” In fact, Reed says Jones was furloughed along with 1,300 other staff near the start of the pandemic. She also has documents suggesting Jones had serious performance issues at his job.

At the most basic factual level, Reed told me that it was simply false that Jones chose to resign in 2020, let alone that they did so “primarily” because of Reed herself. Rather, she said, Jones was furloughed in April 2020 as the pandemic spiraled out of control, and this seemed to be confirmed by a contemporaneous email Reed provided. “As you may have heard/seen in the news Wash U is currently furloughing about 1300 staff,” Reed wrote on April 22 of that year. “From the trans team thus far we only know that Jess has been a part of that group. We will know more as this week progresses.”…

Reed explained that whenever the clinic got a referral from a potential new patient, there was a process in place to make sure the education liaison — Jones, for a period of time — engaged in the necessary follow-up communication to offer the family educational resources, a discussion around any issues they were having with their school or school district, and so forth. Reed said Jones “did not do the necessary follow-up often, or document it,” and that she “was seeing that they were not closing the loop back or documenting in the electronic medical record the work that they were supposed to be doing.” Reed shared a spreadsheet she kept at the time tracking new referrals. The spreadsheet, which has personal information about patients redacted, appears to contain many instances of Jones failing to complete their follow-up duties, as demonstrated in this screenshot of the top of it:

You can follow the link to see the spreadsheet in question along with an email replying to the clinic’s co-director who had asked about Jones’ performance issues. As for the claim that Reed misgendered trans people at the clinic, Reed says that was an exaggeration of one significant argument she did have with Jones. It started when a nonbinary patient who used “they” pronouns but who had a female name complained about being misgendered. The therapist suggested adopting a less stereotypically female name and the patient was upset by that as the father who was also in the room and who demanded the clinic cut ties with the therapist. Jess Jones took the position that the clinic should stop referring patients to that particular therapist and Reed disagreed with him. After that, she never again had a good working relationship with Jones.

There was also another sketchy claim made in the Post-Dispatch story. Jess Jones claimed to have made a complaint to her supervisor about Reed. And the paper notes in the next sentence that Reed had admitted to receiving one negative performance review in 2021. But Reed claims that review had nothing to do with Jones who was apparently long gone by the time it was made. And Singal notes there’s still not proof Jones made a complaint. Reed says if there was such a complaint she never heard anything about it.

Singal contacted Jess Jones several times, even outlining what he planned to publish, and never got a response. I obviously don’t know who is telling the truth in this case but Reed at least seems to have some documentation to back her up while Jones hasn’t provided anything to back up his account so far.

Finally, when the Post-Dispatch published the story about Reed last week I was immediately skeptical someone had organized this.

Let me say I am immediately curious about how the Post-Dispatch tracked down 20+ former patients. My guess is that they had some help, either from the clinic itself, or alternatively from a group of self-selected parents who put themselves forward to contradict Reed’s story. The fact that many are speaking anonymously means no one can really check to see how this all came together.

Jesse Singal found the evidence to back up my suspicions.

On top of all this, neither journalist was aware that the same day Reed’s Free Press article came out, TransParent sent out an email subject-lined “Urgent Action Needed!” asking parents to come forward with positive stories about the clinic — or if they were aware of this, they didn’t disclose it in their stories…

TransParent has every right to do this, and the existence of this email doesn’t inherently call into question the account of parents linked to the organization. But of course this email should affect how we view the fact that most of the parents who have spoken to journalists so far have expressed positive feelings toward the clinic — a point emphasized in both stories. At least some of them are members of an activist group that asked them to do just that!

He’s exactly right. It’s fair game to organize a response to a negative story but the Post-Dispatch should have caught on to the fact and they should have mentioned in the story that this was a group of organized parents connected to an activist group co-founded by the woman they quoted in their headline.

In fact, it’s a bit hard for me to believe the author of the story didn’t know that after talking to everyone, though I guess it’s possible. Either the activist group hid their involvement from the author or the author hid it from readers. Either way it’s not good.