Tom Pappert, lead reporter at The Tennessee Star, said it “makes sense” how Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) appears to have some sort of role in introducing teenagers and children with mental health problems to transgenderism for further treatment.
On Thursday, a distraught father of a teenage daughter receiving treatment at Vanderbilt Psychiatric Hospital, part of VUMC, contacted The Star saying his daughter “began mentioning a trans lifestyle and adopted a male name” while being treated at the psychiatric hospital.
The father contacted The Star in response to its reporting on the connection between Audrey Elizabeth Hale, the 28-year old transgender Covenant School killer, who was a 22-year mental health patient at VUMC and was prescribed at least five medications, including three anti-anxiety medications and an antidepressant, prior to her March 27, 2023 attack.
The father, comparing his daughter’s experience with VUMC and Hale’s recently-uncovered connection to the hospital, told The Star, “I have reason but no concrete proof to believe that the Psychiatric Hospital played a role in molding and shaping her into wanting to live a trans lifestyle…Knowing what I now know, I also believe that the same people who treated Audrey Hale have treated and may well be presently treating my daughter.”
He continued, “This begs the question – is Vanderbilt’s Psychiatric Hospital an incubator for creating psychologically compromised trans youth who are then referred for transition surgery at the main hospital?”
Pappert, who has reported extensively on The Star’s obtaining of dozens of documents related to the case of Hale, said the father’s speculation that Vanderbilt appears to be an “incubator” for transgender individuals “makes sense” from a business standpoint.
“This is in a vacuum. It seems that before this, [the father’s daughter] was a normal girl who had, according to this brief message we’ve been given, some mental issues. She then goes to Vanderbilt and soon after starts identifying as a transgender male,” Pappert explained on Friday’s edition of The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
Pappert’s theory also comes after The Star reported on an unearthed video from 2018 that showed a VUMC staff member identified as Dr. Shayne Taylor who claimed she convinced the hospital to begin offering gender affirming care because it is a “big money maker.”
“[The father is] also probably thinking that this would make sense – it keeps it all in the same hospital, it keeps it all in the same family, and it keeps the insurance company getting billed as this person, his daughter, goes from being a teenager having mental health problems to potentially an adult having gender identity problems,” Pappert added.
To the father’s point that there may be “others who are in the same predicament” as his daughter and the school killer, Pappert said if such theory is correct, not only would VUMC have had proved to fail its patients, but it would also prove a “failure of the psychiatric and psychological system in the United States of America.”
Pappert said, “I think it’s possible that we might have stumbled upon a failure of the psychiatric and psychological system in the United States of America, where maybe because of the DSM-5, they are not accurately and adequately understanding what transgenderism and body dysmorphia are, and so instead of treating them as a mental illness, they’re responding by telling them, ‘No, your mental illness is correct. Let’s cut body parts off.’”
“The DSM-5 is the diagnostic standard of medicine that in 2015 or 2016, somewhere in that window was updated, and previously it considered transgenderism and body dysmorphia, which is what they believe causes transgenderism, to be a mental illness that can be treated with therapy and psychiatric drugs, and something that people have to live with. But the treatment was not necessarily to encourage it. When DSM-5 came around, now the treatment for transgenderism is gender affirming care where you are given hormones and you are affirmed in what you believe your gender to be,” Pappert added.
Watch the full interview:
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Kaitlin Housler is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Kaitlin on X / Twitter.
Image “Tom Pappert” by The Michael Patrick Leahy Show.
