Society · Gender Medicine · July 1, 2026

For Thirteen Years She Was “Tiger.” Now Roxxanne Reed Is Asking Why No One Told Her the Whole Truth — and a Leaked Deposition Shows Why.

On September 30, 2024, The Free Press published a personal essay by Roxxanne “Tiger” Reed, a 44-year-old librarian in St. Louis, Missouri. “Tiger” was the name Roxxanne used during roughly thirteen years living as a transgender man, a period that began in the early 2010s, included testosterone and a double mastectomy, and ended when she detransitioned back to living as a woman. She wrote the essay, she said, not to relitigate her own choices but so other adults considering medical transition would know “there are more options than medicalizing their bodies for the rest of their lives.”

Roxxanne is married to Jamie Reed, the former case manager at Washington University’s Transgender Center whose own 2023 Free Press essay — “I Thought I Was Saving Trans Kids. Then I Blew the Whistle” — triggered a Missouri attorney general investigation and the state’s 2023 law restricting gender-affirming care for minors. Roxxanne’s essay is a distinct story: an adult’s account of her own thirteen-year transition and detransition, not a claim about pediatric care. But the two accounts sit inside the same household, and together they trace a wider story this page follows to its institutional end point — what the organization that wrote the clinical guidelines Roxxanne and thousands of others relied on knew, and did not disclose, about who was writing them.

None of what follows is a criminal case or a settled legal verdict against any doctor who treated her. It is Roxxanne Reed’s own account of a medical and personal journey, set beside a documented record of how the field’s leading professional association — the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, or WPATH — wrote its most recent Standards of Care, and what regulators are now doing about it.

~13 years — the span Roxxanne Reed lived as “Tiger,” including testosterone and a double mastectomy, before detransitioning · Source: The Free Press
Feb. 9, 2023 — Jamie Reed's Free Press whistleblower essay on WashU's Transgender Center, which triggered a Missouri AG investigation · Source: The Free Press; Missouri Independent
SB49 (2023) — Missouri's SAFE Act, restricting gender-affirming care for minors, signed by Gov. Mike Parson (R) on June 7, 2023 · Source: Wikipedia (Missouri SB49)
6-3 — the Supreme Court's June 18, 2025 ruling in United States v. Skrmetti, upholding Tennessee's minors' gender-care ban and the legal framework roughly two dozen states rely on · Source: Wikipedia (Skrmetti)
$1,000,000+/year — reported annual earnings Dr. Marci Bowers draws from gender-affirming surgeries, cited in a deposition as an undisclosed WPATH conflict of interest · Source: City Journal
June 17, 2026 — the FTC and four state attorneys general sued WPATH in federal court, alleging deceptive claims about pediatric transition guidelines · Source: STAT News; The Hill

§ 01 / Thirteen Years as “Tiger”

Roxxanne and Jamie met at church in 2015. By then Roxxanne had already begun living as “Tiger,” the identity and name she used during her transition, which per the essay and wire coverage of it had begun several years earlier and included testosterone therapy. The two married in 2016, and Roxxanne underwent a double mastectomy the following year. Jamie went on to work as a case manager at Washington University’s Transgender Center from 2018 to 2022 — the job that would later put her at the center of a state investigation.

In the essay, Roxxanne described one of testosterone’s earliest effects on her: she lost her ability to cry. In its place, she wrote, came “a rage that would come out of nowhere.” She has said she knows her account will not draw much sympathy from people skeptical of adults who detransition after choosing to transition in the first place — “I know there isn’t a lot of sympathy for those of us who transition as adults,” she wrote — but she published it anyway, on the record, under her own name.

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The Free Press

@TheFP · Sept. 30, 2024· paraphrase

"I want people to know there are more options than medicalizing their bodies for the rest of their lives." Roxxanne "Tiger" Reed transitioned to living as a man for over a decade. Now she's telling her story of detransition.

§ 02 / “I’m Just So Tired”: Deciding to Detransition

Roxxanne has described the decision to detransition less as a single epiphany than as exhaustion. “I’m just so tired,” she has said of reaching the point where she stopped taking testosterone and began living again as a woman. In interviews given alongside the essay’s publication, she said transitioning “couldn’t bring me the sense of comfort and inner peace I was seeking” — and that the changes she went through are not ones she can undo. “It’s my life,” she has said. “I can’t do anything to change it now.”

Cartoon satire: a woman standing before two doors, one labeled 'Transition' already walked through and closing behind her, the other labeled 'Detransition' standing ajar, both with a small price tag reading 'Not Covered' hanging from the handle — Roxxanne Reed has described detransition as irreversible in ways transition was not — and, per wire reporting on detransitioners generally, often not covered by insurance even when the original transition was. Source: The Free Press; wire coverage.

That irreversibility carries a financial dimension that rarely makes it into the political debate: care associated with detransitioning — hair removal, voice therapy, reconstructive surgery — is often not covered by insurance, even in cases where the original transition-related care was. For a detransitioner, the bill for reversing course frequently lands entirely on the patient.

Roxxanne “Tiger” Reed

@rentedocean · Sept. 30, 2024· paraphrase

I was really horrified when Jamie decided to go public. I knew we would lose friends. But I also know what it cost me to stay quiet about my own story for this long.

§ 03 / The Whistleblower in the Family

Roxxanne’s essay cannot be read apart from what her wife did a year and a half earlier. In January 2023, Jamie Reed submitted an affidavit to Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey (R) alleging that WashU’s Transgender Center provided inadequate informed consent and assessment for minors seeking gender-affirming care. The Free Press published her whistleblower essay the following month, and Bailey’s office opened an investigation. On June 7, 2023, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson (R) signed SB49, the SAFE Act, restricting gender-affirming care for minors statewide; it took effect that August.

The law did not go unchallenged. The ACLU and Lambda Legal sued in July 2023 (Noe v. Parson), and the case went to trial in October 2024, with Jamie Reed testifying. A Cole County judge upheld SB49 that November. In between, in July 2024, Jamie announced that WashU’s Transgender Center was closing — a characterization the university disputed. Here the record is genuinely contested, and this page says so plainly: WashU’s internal investigation into Jamie’s claims called them “unsubstantiated,” though that investigation notably never interviewed her directly, and other families who used the clinic have disputed her account in wire reporting. Roxxanne’s own essay does not resolve that dispute; it simply adds her personal, adult account of medical transition and detransition to the same public conversation her wife’s whistleblowing opened.

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Civic Intelligence has covered a related but separate story before: the site’s existing page on the Texas Supreme Court’s detransitioner ruling at /society/texas-detransitioner-win concerns a different subject entirely — a court case over parental consent and medical liability, not Roxxanne Reed’s personal essay. The two are worth reading together, not conflating.

§ 04 / What the Institutions Knew: WPATH’s Undisclosed Conflicts

The clinical guidelines behind gender-affirming care in the United States come largely from one organization: the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, whose Standards of Care, version 8 (SOC-8), was published in 2022. In March 2024, the nonprofit Environmental Progress published “The WPATH Files” — leaked internal communications raising questions about how those standards were built. The following month, the United Kingdom’s Cass Review, a four-year independent inquiry into pediatric gender medicine, delivered its final report and found the evidence base for pediatric medical transition “remarkably weak.”

Cartoon satire: a courtroom deposition scene, a witness in a chair labeled 'WPATH SOC-8 Chair' surrounded by dollar signs floating above a stack of guideline binders, a lawyer holding up a magnifying glass — Under deposition, WPATH's SOC-8 chair, Dr. Eli Coleman, acknowledged that most authors of the 2022 Standards of Care had undisclosed financial conflicts of interest. Source: City Journal.

The sharpest documentation of that conflict came under oath. In a deposition later obtained and reported by City Journal, WPATH’s SOC-8 chair, Dr. Eli Coleman, acknowledged that “most” of the standards’ authors carried undisclosed financial conflicts of interest. Coleman defined the problem himself in the deposition: “A person whose work or professional group fundamentally is jeopardized or enhanced by a guideline recommendation is said to have intellectual conflict of interest.” Cited in that same deposition as an example: Dr. Marci Bowers, a SOC-8 contributor reported to earn more than $1,000,000 a year from gender-affirming surgeries — income directly tied to the volume of patients the guidelines she helped write would refer for surgery.

The Editorial Lane

What this is — A documented personal account of an adult’s thirteen-year transition and detransition, set beside a documented record of undisclosed financial conflicts of interest among the authors of the clinical guidelines that shape gender-affirming care nationwide.

What this is not — A claim that any specific doctor who treated Roxxanne Reed broke the law, or a verdict on the disputed WashU allegations, which remain contested in the public record.

Why it sits in Society — When the professional body writing the standards of care has acknowledged, under deposition, undisclosed conflicts among “most” of its own authors, that is a governance failure with a direct human cost — the cost this essay describes in the first person.

§ 05 / The Federal Reckoning

The legal and regulatory ground has shifted substantially since Roxxanne’s essay published. On June 18, 2025, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in United States v. Skrmetti, upholding Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors — validating the legal framework Missouri and roughly two dozen other states now rely on. In November 2025, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services published a peer-reviewed evidence review of pediatric gender dysphoria treatment. The following month, HHS formally declared gender-affirming care for minors “neither safe nor effective” and moved to restrict federal program coverage of it for patients under 19.

The most direct institutional consequence landed on June 17, 2026, when the Federal Trade Commission and the attorneys general of Alaska, Iowa, Nebraska, and Texas sued WPATH in the Northern District of Texas, alleging deceptive claims about pediatric transition guidelines. FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, a Trump-administration appointee, framed the suit as ordinary consumer-protection enforcement: “The complaint filed today reflects that same long-standing mandate: when an entity makes a claim about a medical treatment, the claim must be truthful, evidence-based and not misleading.” WPATH rejected the premise of federal jurisdiction over medical judgment: “The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is not a medical provider and has no place interfering with the process of individualized medical decision-making.”

“The complaint filed today reflects that same long-standing mandate: when an entity makes a claim about a medical treatment, the claim must be truthful, evidence-based and not misleading.”
FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, announcing FTC v. WPATH, June 17, 2026

Roxxanne Reed’s story is not an isolated data point. Chloe Cole’s lawsuit against Kaiser Permanente over her own pediatric transition is set for trial in April 2027, and Kaiser Permanente separately settled a claim with detransitioner Richard Ikechukwu Anumene for $50,000 before that case was dismissed in September 2024. Taken together with Roxxanne’s account, the emerging pattern is not that every patient regrets transition — most who transition do not detransition — but that a meaningful and growing number of people who did are now describing, in courtrooms, depositions, and personal essays, a system whose standards were written in part by people with an undisclosed stake in the answer.

Who Wrote the Standards

Dr. Eli Coleman — WPATH SOC-8 chair; acknowledged under deposition that “most” SOC-8 authors carried undisclosed financial conflicts of interest.

Dr. Marci Bowers — SOC-8 contributor; reported to earn over $1,000,000 a year from gender-affirming surgeries, cited in Coleman’s deposition as an example of the conflict.

FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson — led the June 2026 federal suit against WPATH alleging its pediatric guidance claims were deceptive under consumer-protection law.

None of that undoes what Roxxanne Reed lost, or what she says she gained back. Her essay does not ask readers to relitigate her marriage, her decisions, or her wife’s disputed workplace claims. It asks something narrower and harder to dismiss: that the next adult standing where she once stood get a fuller accounting of who wrote the guidelines recommending her care, and what those authors stood to gain from the answer.