America’s most infamous transgender youth center of 2023 is now officially closed. The Washington University School of Medicine Pediatric Gender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital drew headlines last February when a whistleblower exposed the center’s “morally and medically appalling” practices in a sworn affidavit. Last week, after resisting a months-long state investigation, the center announced it will close its doors permanently.

Only time will tell if St. Louis Children’s Hospital genuinely shuttered its gender transition center for youth, or if it followed the example of Texas Children’s Hospital, which merely redistributed its illegal gender transition practices and carried them on more secretly.

In some ways, the hospital’s secretive actions have begun already. So little fanfare accompanied the closure that it only hit the media on Wednesday, when the whistleblower, Jamie Reed, published an op-ed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In that piece, Reed reaffirmed her self-identity as “a gay woman” and “fierce LGBT rights advocate,” while also insisting, “every day that goes by I grow more confident that I did the right thing.”

Reed’s conviction is particularly informed by the Cass report, a systematic review of the U.K.’s provision of gender transition procedures to youth, finding “remarkably weak evidence” for the use of these procedures on minors, and absolutely “no evidence” that they reduce suicide.

The elevation of ideology over evidence is what led Reed to become a whistleblower on the St. Louis clinic. “Led by true believers, the clinic ignored growing international concerns … and pressured its staff to suppress doubt that what we were doing actually helps. I shared my concerns, but was told to remain silent,” she said. “Innovation in medicine is necessary, but when impervious to evidence it amounts to unethical experimentation.”

When Reed blew the whistle on the trans youth center ignoring evidence, bullying parents, neglecting the best interest of children, and even unlawfully billing state taxpayers, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R) quickly launched an investigation.

The center’s closure has “got to be related to your investigation,” Family Research Council President Tony Perkins told Bailey on “Washington Watch.”

“The pressure that we’ve kept on this issue is causing these clinics to shut down permanently. And that’s a huge win for the health and safety of children in Missouri,” Bailey confirmed. “This investigation is the first of its kind in this nation — multi-agency. We’ve demanded a moratorium on these procedures, worked with our General Assembly to get a bill passed, then successfully defended the bill that prohibits future procedures in the state of Missouri.”

“We feel like we’ve laid out a blueprint for a trial strategy of how states can fight and win to defend similar legislation enacted in their states,” continued Bailey. “We put the evidence to the test and demonstrated that there was no medicine or science to back up the administration of dangerous, powerful chemicals that alter these young, innocent children’s bodies forever.”

Bailey’s investigation also revealed a “clandestine network” of gender transition centers targeting minors across Missouri. His office has already forced three of those centers to turn over documents.

However, the St. Louis transgender center has “refused to release” subpoenaed documents, and their quiet closure could be “an effort to try to stop your probe,” said Perkins. “Could this be that they don’t want certain things exposed, which could bring the whole house of cards down nationally?”

Bailey responded that his office had already faced a “pressure campaign … to cease the investigations” after the center stopped performing most gender transition procedures in reaction to his successful defense of the Missouri SAFE Act.

But “just because we’re preventing wrongdoing going forward doesn’t mean we’re not still going to fight for justice for the victims of this mutilation industry that have suffered in the past,” he declared. “Moreover, we need to ensure that we have the proper policy positions in place to safeguard against abuses in the future. And that requires looking at what went wrong in the past.” Perkins added that any evidence Bailey’s investigation uncovers of willful harm to children “could be used in civil lawsuits … by victims.”

Another factor steeling Bailey’s resolve is his confidence in the morality of his cause. “How dare anyone tell these kids that God put them in the wrong body!” he exclaimed. “We know he doesn’t make mistakes.”

In other words, no matter how long and hard the fight, “we’re not going to be stonewalled,” Bailey insisted. “We’ve won at the trial court level against many of these other clinics, and we’ll continue fighting any clinic that tries to thwart the state’s effort to look back in time and determine what kind of abuse has occurred. … I think that the evidence here in Missouri is going to largely comport with that experience in England.”

The international ebb of gender transition procedures for minors is not confined to England. “Since I went public,” recounted whistleblower Reed, “three events have shaken the world of youth gender medicine.”

First, the World Health Organization admitted the medical evidence for performing gender transition procedures on minors is “limited and variable.”

Second, “one of the U.K.’s most trusted pediatricians” conducted a four-year review, including seven systematic reviews of the evidence, to find that “children have been let down by a lack of research and remarkably weak evidence.”

Third, private communications subpoenaed in a lawsuit revealed that the World Professional Association for Transgender Health “suppressed evidence that it didn’t like and deliberately misled the public in its recommendations.”

For a movement used to browbeating doubters about “following the science,” that’s a lot of unscientific embarrassment.

“I want Missouri to be the safest state in the nation for children,” Bailey said in a press release. “The closure of any clinic who has mutilated children is a major step towards that goal. I will not stop until the clandestine network of clinics mutilating children is permanently dismantled and bad actors are held accountable.”