I spent a little less than a decade in the classroom. I saw a lot of growth, maturity, and diversity in that short time.

I didn’t notice a rise in transgender students until the past three or four years. They would instead approach teachers to ask permission to use their preferred names.

There were many issues. This policy can cause students to feel alienated if they feel uncomfortable sharing their stories.

It is important to consider their views before recommending life-altering treatment. They may not fully understand their request.

Bari Weiss has created The Free Press, a new outlet for journalism. This piece features Jamie Reed, a progressive woman who worked in a transition center. She feels the need to tell her story.

Reed shares her history to show that she’s not a conservative sheep-dresser.

Nearly four years ago I worked at The Washington University School of Medicine Division of Infectious diseases with HIV-positive teens. Because I was transgender in my childhood and adolescence, I can relate. We are raising our biological children who were adopted from foster homes.

This column shows how little care is given to children who visit the center to question their gender. They don’t even consider the long-term consequences.

Furthermore, although some doctors at the center are openly open to “social contagion”, other medical professionals publicly acknowledge that such cases are an actual phenomenon in these children.

A small number of these boys were diagnosed with gender dysphoria in childhood, but this was only a fraction of the total. Many of these girls were not known to have suffered from gender distress, and they declared that they required immediate testosterone treatment.

This is something I was familiar with at the center.

There were many comorbidities present in the girls who came and saw us. A study of a British transgender center found that 33% of the patients were on the autism spectrum.

Many patients claimed that they had Tourette syndrome. They also claimed that they had tic disorders. They also claimed that they had multiple personalities.

Reed was right. I saw similar results in the classroom. Even in a district that used a hybrid school model, children spent more time at their computers than they did with their friends. Many of these children were constantly being bombarded by social media influencers who had enough reach to tell their stories.

For girls, platforms like Snapchat and Instagram bombard them with unrealistic expectations of beauty and femininity. This is particularly distressing for girls who give up on competing and choose to be boys.

Reed points out, however, that children from troubled homes and those with mental disorders were more common than ever. These people claimed to have gender dysphoria.

We live in a broken society and medical professionals are so focused on the safety of their patients that they don’t consider the potential risks.

While states have banned this treatment for minors, there is one thing I can suggest to those states considering legislation. If you want to allow counseling or ban it altogether, it is important that you establish minimum requirements. If you plan to allow counseling, it’s important to set minimum requirements.