Children’s health professionals are complaining that the mutilation of minors, dishonestly packaged by mainstream media outlets as “gender affirming care,” is under attack.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, and the Children’s Hospital Association, sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland on October 3, asking him to investigate threats against hospitals that encourage children to change their gender.
“From Boston to Akron to Nashville to Seattle, children’s hospitals, academic health systems, and physicians are being targeted and threatened for providing evidence-based health care,” their letter warns.
Never mind that the bomb threat to Boston Children’s Hospital, which made the news last month, was apparently a hoax. That likely won’t matter to Garland, who has long fought back the facts threatening the Left’s victim narrative.
You can expect Garland to take this letter seriously, as his partisan record includes announcing that clinics should be protected in their efforts to perform nonstop abortions, but becoming suddenly immobilized when it comes to responding to actual fire bombings and threats to crisis pregnancy centers.
What’s truly concerning about this letter, though, is not that the Justice Department might expend more resources on bomb threats that may or may not exist. It’s that these health professionals are trying to get the federal government to shut down not just crime, but free speech.
The medical associations, which together represent “more than 270,000 physicians and more than 220 children’s hospitals across the country,” place blame for these allegedly numerous threats of violence on everyday social media users who object to their so-called “evidence-based health care.”
“The attacks are rooted in an intentional campaign of disinformation, where a few high-profile users on social media share false and misleading information targeting individual physicians and hospitals, resulting in a rapid escalation of threats, harassment, and disruption of care across multiple jurisdictions,” the letter reads. “Our organizations have called on technology companies to do more to prevent this practice on digital platforms, and we now urge your office to take swift action to investigate and prosecute all organizations, individuals, and entities responsible.”
One such high-profile user is Libs of TikTok, a conservative account with 1.4 million followers on Twitter. It frequently shares clips of leftist craziness, from babies at drag shows to children’s hospitals bragging about their “gender-affirming care,” a nice code for feeding children’s gender dysphoria.
In August, the account posted a video from the Boston Children’s Hospital, with a caption saying that the hospital “is now offering ‘gender affirming hysterectomies’ for young girls.” The media immediately went to work defending the hospital, rating the specific claim that the hospital provides “hysterectomies for children” as false.
According to the Boston Children’s Hospital website today, it does not offer genital surgery until the age of 18, but it does offer chest surgery starting at 15 years old. And, worse, according to the website before the viral Libs of TikTok video, patients as young as 17 years old qualified for vaginoplasty, “a procedure in which surgeons create a vagina from your existing genital tissue.” Less than a week after the tweet was posted, though, the hospital website was updated to say that patients must be 18 for phalloplasty, metoidioplasty, and vaginoplasty.
If it all sounds a little confusing, that’s because it is. Intentionally so. Boston Children’s Hospital, the medical establishment, and their friends in the media are quibbling with phrasing to hide the fact that minors in the U.S. are still eligible for surgery to permanently alter their bodies. And, apparently, the villain here isn’t the host of doctors willing to perform these experiments on children — it’s the people online with enough commonsense to stand up to them.
The AMA letter’s appeal to social media sites and the DOJ is chilling. As the Libs of TikTok saga tells us, what qualifies as “disinformation” is highly subjective, especially when you can stealthily edit your website to move the narrative in your favor.
When health professionals call puberty blockers and invasive, unnecessary surgery “evidence-based health care” with a straight face, then even questioning the prevailing gender dogma is sure to put your head on the chopping block.
On top of that, sharing information does not make someone responsible for other people’s actions. If a social media user were to suggest that bomb threats against a children’s hospital were a good idea, that would be one thing. But to chastise someone for sharing public information with her followers, and then blame her for any ensuing threats of violence, is ridiculous.
Note that the AMA letter complains not just of “threats” and “harassment,” but “disruption of care.” The health establishment is calling for federal intervention not because it’s afraid for the children in its charge, but because it’s worried that a dose of common sense will threaten a growing source of cash.
Madeline Fry Schultz (@madelineefry) is the assistant contributors editor at the Washington Examiner.
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.