Republican lawmakers across seven states signaled in a Wednesday letter reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation that they would inflict repercussions on medical facilities that perform so-called ‘gender-affirming care’ on children.
Lawmakers from the State Freedom Caucus Network, a group composed of conservative members aiming to decentralize government power in federal agencies, penned the letter rebuking the American Medical Association (A.M.A.) and American Academy of Pediatrics (A.A.P.) for urging Biden Administration officials and federal agents to investigate journalists exposing radical gender surgeries that medical facilities are allegedly offering and performing on minors nationwide.
Signatures from the group’s lawmakers represent Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Nevada, South Dakota, Illinois, and Arizona.
“With your advocacy of childhood genital mutilation, your call to investigate those who disagree with you, and your request for Big Tech to suppress constitutionally protected free speech that challenges your leftist ideology, you have lost whatever credibility you had left,” the letter read.
The American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, and Children’s Hospital Association all signed the letter to U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, urging the administration to “investigate the organizations, individuals, and entities” that it claimed were “coordinating” and “provoking” outrage online directed at those providing the controversial services.
According to the letter, lawmakers condemned the medical institutions for pushing and making decisions for young children to take action, resulting in “irrevocable and irreparable harm.”
“This so-called ‘gender-affirming care’ is both morally and ethically repugnant,” the letter read. “We will fulfill our duty to stand in the gap and stop harm to any child by unnatural and irreversible procedures.”
State legislators wrote they would ensure such taxpayer-funded institutions should take “no part in furthering ethically and morally repugnant agendas” contrary to their state’s values.
“Collectively, and across the country, we will be pursuing a path to ensure no minors can receive these barbaric procedures,” the lawmakers wrote. “This includes calling on our governors to denounce this practice and using all available tools to end it.”
The Daily Wire reported at least 47 pediatric gender clinics, many at prominent children’s hospitals, have broadened the scope of their patient criteria to include not only transgender-identified children but those they describe as “gender creative,” “gender diverse,” or “gender nonconforming.”
Some of these programs see patients as young as two and three years old. However, while most clinics will not offer medical interventions until a child has reached puberty, many will help facilitate a “social transition.”
Such social transitions have forced the State Freedom Caucus Network to push back on the facilities that could face repercussions if the programs are proven non-compliant.
“This mutilation cannot and will not be tolerated in any form,” the letter reads.
Manhattan Institute fellow Christopher Rufo, who originally obtained the letter signed by the three major American medical institutions, said in a tweet that the “American Medical Association is attempting to censor, de-platform, investigate, and prosecute journalists questioning the orthodoxy of radical gender surgeries for minors, arguing that public criticism is ‘disinformation.'”
“This is now the Left’s playbook: last year, the National School Board Association, Department of Justice, and F.B.I. worked together to label parents who opposed critical race theory ‘domestic terrorists,'” Rufo said. “They want to stifle dissent, suppress speech, and criminalize opposition. If ‘gender-affirming care’ is so good, the activists and doctors who promote it—and profit from it—should defend their practices in the realm of public opinion.”
“In a democracy, everyone gets to weigh in on important issues, not just regime-approved apparatchiks,” he added.
Ryan Saavedra and Christina Buttons contributed to this report.