Did I Publish The Private Medical Records Of Transgender Children?

Responding to a(nother) viral rumor

People often get mad at me online over the things I write, and as a result, they sometimes attempt to spread professionally damaging rumors about me. I try to use this space only sparingly to respond to those rumors, because in most cases it doesn’t make for particularly compelling content, and I think it can come across as defensive and whiny. I’m lucky to have a platform and to make a living writing and talking, and one of the costs of that, if you choose to cover controversial subjects, is that some people will attack your reputation. Overall, I’m okay with the trade-off.

Every so often, though, there’s a rumor people spread about me that is serious enough, or has gotten enough pickup, or has simply generated a particularly memorable online firestorm, that I decide to respond. If you’re a real sicko, see here, here, and here (this one’s more funny than frustrating) for a few examples of me rising to the bait.

This, alas, will also be one of those posts. If you close this tab in favor of something more exciting, like the current state of the NBA In-Season Tournament, I will not blame you one bit. But a huge number of people have accused me of publicly posting the medical records of trans minors since last year, and now that the rumor has attained a second life, I feel like my best route is to respond in writing.

This second round was prompted by the fact that I joined Bluesky, a Twitter alternative that has a base of hardened far-left power users who get really mad when folks they dislike show up. I quickly became the single most blocked account on the site and, fearful of second-order contamination, these users also developed tools to allow for the mass-blocking of anyone who follows me. That way they won’t have to face the threat of seeing any content from me or from anyone who follows me. A truly safe space, at last.

But that hasn’t been enough: They’ve also been aggressively lobbying the site’s head of trust and safety, Aaron Rodericks, to boot me off (here’s one example: “you asshole. you asshole. you asshole. you asshole. you want me dead. you want me fucking dead. i bet you’ll block me and I’ll pass right out of existence for you as fast as i entered it with this post. I’ll be buried and you won’t care. you love your buddy singal so much it’s sick.”). Many of these complaints come from people who seem so highly dysregulated they would have trouble successfully patronizing a Waffle House, but because they’re so active online, they can have a real-world impact.

So, not content with merely blocking me and blocking anyone who follows me, and screaming at people who refuse to block me, they’ve also begun recirculating every negative rumor about me that’s been posted online since 2017 or so — and there’s a rich back catalogue, to be sure. They’ve even launched a new one: I’m a pedophile. (Yes, they’re really saying that!)

One of those rumors is that I have mistreated a minor or minors by doxing them, releasing their medical records, or some combination of both. The details differ depending on the reteller. It’s a rumor that has been given new life by posts like this one from a relatively random person whose identity I’ll obscure:

Jesse Singal doxxed the medical records of a minor child because they were trans

He did that ON TWITTER

He should not be allowed on any social media to hurt more children

Jesse Singal DOXXED A CHILD'S MEDICAL RECORDS BECAUSE HE HATES TRANS KIDS SO MUCH.

GET HIM OUT OF HERE

Another example comes from a person named Matthew Cortland, a senior fellow at Data for Progress, a respected left-of-center survey outfit, who we’ll get back to:

Jesse Singal is a malevolent actor who targets children for harassment and abuse.

Don’t believe me?

This is a complaint I filed with the U.S. Department of HHS, Office of Civil Rights in 2023 after Singal decided to publish the medical records of minor children.

Whoa — I was reported to HHS!

In since-deleted posts, Alejandra Caraballo, a famous trans activist and instructor at the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, reposted Cortland’s claim and asserted that I “posted intimate details about children’s medical records.”

“Those kids can’t get their medical privacy or their healthcare back,” she said in a follow-up post. “Many of them were forced to leave Missouri because of what Singal did publishing that. I hope he never knows a moment of peace.”

Irresistible aside: Caraballo used the same language to describe me that she used to describe the six justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, as highlighted by Rep. Nancy Mace during a surreal moment when Caraballo was asked to testify before a House oversight committee about online harassment.

Caraballo, then, argued that my alleged violation of these children’s medical privacy was so severe they had to move, that I should never know a moment of peace, that I should always have to fear someone confronting me in public over my heinous actions. These are unbelievably serious claims coming from a high-profile activist who, again, works at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society (which once published a white paper titled “Interventions for Online Harassment of Journalists.”)

The users hoping to get me booted from Bluesky have even started a Change.org petition — approaching 10,000 signatories as I sign this — claiming that my posting of a minor’s personal medical information to that site constitutes a significant enough breach to warrant my banishment.

I hope this won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has been following my work for a while, and who has at least a vague sense of who I am as a person, but no, I didn’t release any children’s medical records, dox them, or “target [them] for harassment and abuse.” This entire rumor relies on one line from one story I wrote, and the line in question doesn’t come anywhere close to justifying these hysterics.

***

In February of last year, Jamie Reed, a former case manager at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital, came forward as a whistleblower. In a sworn affidavit and first-person Free Press article, she accused the clinic of improperly managing the mental health of youth seeking transition, and shuttling many of them toward puberty blockers and hormones too hastily.

Many of my fellow journalists and pundits immediately attacked Reed as unreliable, without investigating her accusations at all. This annoyed me, so I wrote a couple articles for this newsletter about the controversy.

The article that appears to have seeded the “private medical information” rumor was dedicated to one particular incident relayed in Reed’s affidavit:

One patient came to the Center identifying as a “communist, attack helicopter, human, female, maybe non binary.” The child was in very poor mental health and early on reported that they had no idea their gender identity. Rather than treat the child for their serious mental health problems, the Center put the child on cross-sex hormones and ignored the child’s obvious mental health problems. The child subsequently reported that their mental health actually was worsening once they started the cross-sex hormones.

“I sexually identify as an attack helicopter” is a meme (and caused an interesting online blowup that led to a pile on against a talented trans sci-fi writer). Reed’s many detractors latched on to this fact as proof that Reed was mentally unstable, as Tom Scocca suggested might be the case, a liar, or both.

As I wrote:

My former New York magazine colleague Jon Chait came in for a cavalcade of criticism online, simply because he sympathetically cited Reed’s affidavit, helicopter child included, in an article published last month.

At some point, a strange game of internet telephone took hold. Reed’s original claim, that a child who seemed to identify as a number of things, only one of which was a helicopter, had been rushed too hastily onto hormones, morphed into something orders of magnitude stupider. Amanda Marcotte, a senior writer at the liberal online magazine Salon, begged Chait to simply stop and think about how idiotic he was being: “Dude. Dude. Let it go,” she tweeted at him. “You claimed kids were taking hormones to be helicopters. Take a beat. Exercise. Meditate. Ask hard questions with your therapist about why the personal lives of strangers bother you so much.”

. . .

Rebecca Watson, who runs the science blog Skepchick, devoted a whole article and video to this made-up claim headlined “Journalist Thinks Trans Kids Are Getting Hormones to Turn into Helicopters.” “[U]nlike New York Magazine writers,” she insisted, “most doctors are not credulous morons, and absolutely no doctor would do anything for a kid like that besides recommend intensive therapy for their unbearable need for attention.”

The bulk of my piece was dedicated to simply providing more details, via Reed herself, about this young person’s case, and placing that alleged incident into the broader context of the youth gender medicine debate.

In the piece, I laid out Reed’s timeline of what happened the day she encountered the patient in question. She was working at a satellite location of the St. Louis clinic, and one of her colleagues, a nurse practitioner, came out of an exam room to tell her that a patient there who had recently started hormones was clearly struggling. Reed pulled up their chart, saw a letter of recommendation for hormones with the “helicopter” language, and was alarmed by it. After speaking to the endocrinologist overseeing the patient’s transition, she came to suspect that he either hadn’t read the letter, or hadn’t done so closely. It struck her as one example, of many she encountered (or so she later claimed in her affidavit), of her clinic delivering inadequate care to a vulnerable population and not paying enough attention to the significant mental health problems that sometimes accompany adolescents’ desires to physically transition.

Reed provided me with a lot of details: the location of the satellite clinic in question, the four-month span during which that day occurred (she wouldn’t narrow it down further), and the names of two other clinicians who were involved and who shared her concerns (the NP and a nurse) as well as the name of the endocrinologist. (I kept that individual’s name out of the story because he wasn’t really in a position to defend himself given the firestorm that had just descended on the clinic.)

In my view, Reed’s furnishing of these details made it significantly less likely that she was making the story up or getting any of the major beats wrong. After all, she told me exactly who did what and when on the day the incident occurred, making it very easy for anyone who was involved to simply say “That never happened — she’s lying.” No one has come forward to dispute any of this. (I naturally reached out to everyone involved at the time, but didn’t hear back — again, not surprising given the context.)

All that said, I was cautious in the piece, explaining that “It goes almost without saying that none of this proves that Jamie Reed’s claims are true.” The fact was, no one knew.

Reed never sent me this child’s “medical records.” Rather, she shared exactly one new line from the therapist’s letter that had jumped out at her and which she had copied into a notes document. The other line I included in that story — the line with the “helicopter” language — had already been published in the affidavit, which was itself republished by The St. Louis Post-Dispatch and other outlets, and therefore was already public.

Here’s the context in which that one other line appeared. I’ll bold it:

The patient was quoted in the letter as saying they identified as a “communist, attack helicopter, human, female, maybe non binary.” The therapist also wrote that the patient reported that they “hope for the transition to feel better in my body and no longer just in a flesh box.” Despite these major red flags — or at least what Reed saw as red flags, reading the letter months later — the referring provider nonetheless finished the letter by saying the young person was ready for hormones.

That’s it. That’s the “private medical records,” the “doxing,” the “releasing of trans kids’ medical information,” the reason vulnerable youth had to flee Missouri (according to Alejandra Caraballo), and the reason I should “never know a moment of peace.” That’s what this whole thing is about: 18 non-identifying words from a therapist’s letter of support for hormones. I included the line because it was colorful, sad, and arguably provided more support for Reed’s claim that this child was greenlit for a major medical intervention despite not being in a healthy enough psychological place to take that step.

Should I have considered this line off-limits to publication because it concerned a minor’s medical care? In a word, no. I did not violate any established journalistic norm by publishing it.

Now, it’s true that just like doctors, journalists follow different norms when writing about minors than we do when writing about legal adults. But those norms mostly have to do with specific matters of consent and identification that do not apply to what I wrote. In most situations, if you’re going to quote a minor by name, you’ll want to get the permission of their parent or guardian, partly because minors might not be able to fully grasp the implications of appearing by name in a news story. You’re also covering your own ass a little, because “Why did your reporter talk to my 15-year-old alone, without my permission?” is not something you want to see pop into your editor’s inbox. As with most norms there’s some wriggle room, depending on factors like the minor’s age, whether notifying their guardians could cause them genuine safety concerns, and so on. I could imagine potential situations in which a reporter working with an editor checks with that editor and gets their okay to, in a given instance, talk to a minor without notifying their parents. But the whole point here is that you are publishing the words of someone who is publicly identifiable.

As for identification, in the vast majority of cases, journalists definitely wouldn’t provide information that could allow a minor (who isn’t already a public figure) to be identified without their and their family’s consent. There’s simply a presumption of privacy, when it comes to minors, that doesn’t always apply to adults who find themselves in the news. I’m not saying journalists consider it fair game to publicly identify any adult involved in a news story — it depends a great deal on context, and there are myriad reasons to leave names out of a story — but rather that there’s simply an extra layer of caution when it comes to minors.

So, back to the present controversy: Obviously, if I had published identifying information about this young person, that would have been poor moral and professional judgment. If Reed had given me an excerpt that mentioned the kid’s school, say, or the fact that they went to a particular church, or anything like that, I wouldn’t have quoted the passage, or I would have redacted that information. But Reed didn’t provide me with any identifying information.

Just to make this crystal clear, by the time I wrote my article, it was already public knowledge that Reed had claimed a youth at her clinic had said they identified as a “communist, attack helicopter, human, female, maybe non binary,” and were nonetheless put on hormones, at which point their mental health seemed to be worsening. My critics don’t think that this constituted “releasing the medical records of minors,” let alone “doxing” a minor. If they did, they obviously would have launched a campaign to get the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to take down the affidavit containing this information from their website. So that’s fine — or fine enough to not have generated any complaint. But because I identified the source of this quote as a therapist’s referral letter and also published the line “hope for the transition to feel better in my body and no longer just in a flesh box,” I had committed a heinous act.

Once more: Publishing what I published does not violate any existing journalistic norm. No thinking person actually believes that because of the publication of these 18 words, an individual child is going to be publicly outed as having received youth gender medicine.

Nonetheless, after I published the piece, it was met with one of the more intense outcries I’ve encountered online. Many people, seeking to discredit Reed because she had been critical of a youth gender medicine clinic, began immediately claiming that she had obviously violated HIPAA, the patient privacy law. A surprising number insisted she had violated “HIPPA,” which doesn’t exist.

Others accused me of violating HIPAA or HIPPA, despite the fact that I can’t because the law doesn’t apply to me. Some began calling for my arrest and imprisonment, often in a disconcertingly lusty manner. This included at least some people I knew from real life. August Pollak, who was a colleague of mine at the Center for American Progress many years ago, fantasized about my imprisonment:

Within a couple days, after much mutating and metastasizing, the established truth on social media regarding my conduct became even darker: I had stolen multiple medical files from trans youth and posted their personal information.

This became such A Thing on a certain corner of the internet that The Nib, a lefty cartoon site popular among that corner’s denizens, published this act of satire (??) by someone named Kendra Wells on March 17, four day after my article came out:

So yeah, the cartoon shows me being handed a bunch of minors’ medical files and then nailing them onto a church door, Martin Luther–like, while screaming “THE WHISTLE IS BLOWN!! BEHOLD THE PRIVATE MEDICAL RECORDS OF CHILDREN!!!! TRANSGENDERS ARE FAKE AND DANGEROUS!!” Then I am dragged away by two orderlies — presumably so I can be institutionalized — as I scream “I AM THE GOOD GUY!!!!! I AM THE GOOD GUY HERE!!!!”

While the plot here is far too subtle for me to understand, credit where it’s due: The character certainly sounds like me. (The Nib has since gone out of business, which I find hard to believe given how relatable its content was.)

Meanwhile, the aforementioned Matthew Cortland, a fellow at Data for Progress as well as a healthcare attorney (Cortland uses they/them pronouns), announced on Twitter (now deleted) they were filing a complaint against Reed with the Department of Health and Human Services. This means. . . nothing. I’m not trying to be rude, but anyone can file a HIPAA complaint for any reason via the online portal. Yes, Cortland possesses some knowledge in this area, but they had no particular insight into the specifics of this case, and “someone filed a complaint” doesn’t, on its own, mean anything.

And yet a lot of people took this act — a random attorney with no inside knowledge of the case filing a random complaint — as evidence that Reed had done something wrong. That included some journalists. The St. Louis-Dispatch mentioned it in their coverage, devoting significant space to it and quoting Cortland as confidently stating that assuming I wasn’t lying, the content of my articles proved that “Reed has violated [HIPAA’s] privacy rule.”

I’ve compiled the four pages of Cortland’s complaint that he posted last week here (I reached out to them asking for the full document and if they wanted to comment, but didn’t hear back, despite them noting on Bluesky that I had contacted them). Nothing in there comes close to providing an example of Reed actually disseminating an actual minor’s identifiable information. To be clear, that alone doesn’t exculpate Reed, simply because there are plenty of ways to violate the letter of HIPAA rules without releasing an individual patient’s actual information, some of them having to do with technical matters like how a healthcare worker maintains any personal medical information they have access to, security-wise. There are plenty of ways to violate the letter of HIPAA rules without putting any individual patients at genuine risk of having their information leaked. Making things even more complicated, Reed’s status as a whistleblower might grant her certain forms of immunity that other healthcare providers wouldn’t enjoy.

But to be honest, I believe this whole thing is a red herring — an attack launched by individuals who aren’t mad about potential privacy violations, but who are mad that Jamie Reed criticized a youth gender clinic at a time when this form of medicine is under attack (Missouri has since passed a lengthy moratorium on youth gender medicine that survived a subsequent court challenge). Cortland didn’t respond to my emailed request asking them about the present status of the complaint, but given their willingness to publicly tout the fact that they filed the complaint, if they had any knowledge of HHS actually launching an investigation, wouldn’t they publicly say so, or confirm it to me? As far as I know, none of the outlets that reported on the existence of Cortland’s complaint have published follow-up pieces explaining what happened to it.

Whatever’s going on there, today, about 19 months after Cortland filed their document, there does not appear to be any ongoing HIPAA investigation against Jamie Reed. Reed and her attorney, Ernie Trakas, both denied having been informed of one. Trakas wrote to me:

As you know, [the Child & Parental Rights Campaign] has represented Jamie Reed since 2022, well before the submission of her whistleblower complaint with the Missouri Attorney General. Jamie’s complaint in no way violated HIPAA. Accordingly, no investigation for doing so has been initiated, let alone is ongoing, by any law enforcement entity at any level of government — local, state, or federal. [my link]

To fully cover my bases, I emailed a HIPAA expert yesterday and provided him with the portions of Cortland’s complaint Cortland posted to try and get his thoughts. I also reached out to HHS Tuesday to try to learn the present status of the complaint. I haven’t heard back from either. If there’s anything of note to report, I’ll update this post or write another one. But it’s actually quite rare for HIPAA to inflict any sort of significant punishment on a violator, according to its own summary of complaints its Office of Civil Rights (which handles HIPAA complaints) received between April 2003 and October 2024. The overwhelming majority of complaints are found to be ineligible for investigation, lead to HHS clearing the alleged perpetrator, or are resolved “without the need for an investigation” on the agency’s part.

As of now, it appears that either the federal government disagrees with the many online pundits who believe Jamie Reed committed a HIPAA violation warranting an investigation, or it has decided to forgo any such investigation due to her status as a whistleblower. And of course, when the administration turns over and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (God help us) or whoever takes over at the helm of HHS, the probability of this matter being pursued further will drop to approximately zero.

***

Overall, the desire to throw Jamie Reed in HIPAA prison seems to have died down somewhat. The rumors about my own actions appear to have had more staying power, perhaps because they don’t rely on difficult-to-parse federal rules, but rather on a very simple, very damning claim: An evil journalist maliciously revealed the identities and personal medical details of trans kids.

The first time this rumor went viral, at the peak of the hysteria, with the Kendra Wells cartoon, Cortland’s “complaint,” far too big a Twitter pile on to even start to summarize here, and everything else, someone put up this poster close to my apartment:

If you can’t read it, the top says “Does Jesse Singal have a suspicious obsession with LGBT children??” “Should you keep your children away from this man if you see him??” “Are LGBT people safe with this man in the neighborhood??” “JUST ASKING QUESTIONS.”

This is the first time I’ve mentioned this poster publicly; shortly after it went up, when someone posted it to the BARPod subreddit, I asked them to take it down and they did. I was actually out of town when it was posted, and when I got back to the city I walked around my neighborhood a bit, looking for others. This was the only one, and given the proximity to my home, the absence of others only reinforced my belief that the goal was to send a “we know where you live” signal (if that’s not the case, it was a hell of a coincidence).

I didn’t say anything about this at the time because I’m not in the habit of amplifying the rare instances in which this stuff leaks out into the real world and gets a bit menacing. Obviously, doing so could inspire copycats. But my point is that this sort of rampant, out of control, hysterical rumormongering is inevitably going to spill into real-world actions. If a bunch of people come to believe that there is a maniac out there intentionally posting the private medical records of trans youth, and this belief is given rocket fuel by major, trusted figures like Alejandra Caraballo and so many others, of course this could have consequences — of course it could leak out into the real world. That’s the point of all of this: to make the act of reporting on youth gender medicine extremely “expensive” in terms of reputational damage, fear of real-life harassment or violence, and so on. The more this stuff goes on, with no guardrails whatsoever on the spread of misinformation — and the angry contingent on Bluesky is so walled-off from reality or disagreement that there is even less of a check on the dissemination of false claims than there has been in the past — the more likely it is that someone will take Caraballo’s words to heart and do what they can to ensure I “never know a moment of peace.”

Again, this isn’t just internet randos. These are major figures like Alejandra Caraballo simply lying about my actions, and then sending clear signals that those actions are so grotesque that something needs to be done about me. In real life.

My preference is for that not to happen. If it does happen, though, I want it to be absolutely clear who was responsible.

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Questions? Comments? Awesome posters about how great I am? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com, on Twitter at @jessesingal, or on Bluesky at @jessesingal.com.