When they aren’t busy attacking pro-life authors and raiding the former president’s residence, Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice (DOJ) is willing to entertain enforcing speech codes. After the National School Board Association convinced him that parents objecting to graphic sexualized and racialized content in the K-12 classroom were a domestic terror threat, it makes sense other organizations would follow suit.
In a letter dated Oct. 3, the American Medical Association (AMA), The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), and the Children’s Hospital Association (CHA) asked Garland to “investigate the organizations, individuals, and entities coordinating, provoking, and carrying out bomb threats and threats of personal violence against children’s hospitals and physicians across the U.S.”
Obviously, law enforcement should prosecute anyone calling in a bomb threat or making credible threats against a facility or individual. The DOJ has studiously ignored actual bombings and threats against pregnancy centers and churches in the wake of Dobbs. That could be one reason a recent Issues and Insights poll found that 71% of respondents feel there is a two-tiered system of justice based on a person’s political affiliation. Increasingly, voters view the DOJ as the agency responsible for persecuting President Biden’s political opposition.
However, the addition of the word “provoking” by the letter’s authors should send a chill down your spine. According to the letter, anyone pointing out that some hospitals advertise gender transition services to minors or highlighting doctors bragging about performing surgeries like mastectomies, hysterectomies, oophorectomies (removal of ovaries), and orchiectomies (removal of testicles) on children under 18 is provoking violence:
“These coordinated attacks threaten federally protected rights to healthcare for patient and their families. 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.”
According to the medical associations, people who report on the activities of hospitals and doctors are responsible if another person does something illegal based on that information. If that is the standard for incitement, the DOJ should investigate President Joe Biden for his Philadelphia speech following the murder of alleged “Republican extremist” Cayler Ellingson in Minnesota. It should also look into any journalist who criticized conservative Supreme Court justices in advance of the Dobbs decision because of the attempted assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Equal application of the law would demand it, if the DOJ takes up the cause of the AMA and its partners.
Related: Are More Americans Waking Up to the Horrors of ‘Gender-Affirming Care’?
In the letter, the authors also share that they are actively trying to silence people opposed to gender transition surgeries and the use of puberty blockers for children:
“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.”
It doesn’t take a lot of sleuthing to understand who the medical associations are targeting. The Twitter account Libs of TikTok has been routinely targeted for suspension because she shares videos, audio, and websites created by trans activists and medical providers. It is unclear how using their own words and materials is “misleading,” as the letter claims.
Daily Wire Host Matt Walsh is another critic of transgender services for minors. He recently published investigative reporting showing Vanderbilt University Hospital’s motive to provide gender transition services to children was profit using videos produced and posted by the hospital. How this type of reporting could be called “disinformation” is not evident. Walsh often amplifies content from Libs of TikTok. Trans activists accused Walsh and Libs of TikTok of encouraging violence when unconfirmed news reports claimed someone called a bomb threat into Boston Children’s Hospital. Both users amplified audio from the hospital’s gender clinic indicating that it would provide sterilization surgeries for minors.
Walsh and Tucker Carlson of Fox News also created in-depth documentaries on gender transition for children. Carlson’s work even exposed how radical trans activists use social media to separate lonely and confused children from their families. Yet the medical associations want the DOJ to silence people pointing out these abuses instead of the people grooming vulnerable children to make life-altering decisions.
Do the AMA and its partner organizations also want to silence other nations? The U.K. prohibited the use of puberty blockers and transition surgeries for children 16 and under after a thorough investigation of the Tavistock Clinic. One of the primary criticisms of the gender clinic was its failure to explain the enormous increase in children seeking transition care. It also never investigated how the patient population changed from a small number of young boys to large numbers of adolescent girls who often had autism or a non-gender-related mental health diagnosis.
The letter to the DOJ contends that gender transition services for minors are evidence-based. Nothing could be further from the truth. In direct opposition to the claims by the AMA, AAP, and CHA, the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare (SNBHW) concluded that the evidence base for hormonal interventions for gender-dysphoric youth is low quality and may carry risks. The SNBHW noted the evidence for pediatric transition comes from studies among the small number of young boys that used to make up the population of patients with gender dysphoria. Not the larger group of adolescent girls seeking transition today.
Related: Woke Trans Madness Targeting Religious Freedom but Faithful Are Fighting Back in Court
In Sweden, doctors will now provide psychiatric care to those presenting as gender dysphoric for the first time in their teens. Part of the rationale for the change was the agency’s recognition of increasing reports of detransition and transition-related regret among youth who transitioned in recent years. Media companies and the research community routinely suppress information about detransitioners in the U.S.
An analysis of the data in the U.S. by Jay Greene, Ph.D., a Senior Research Fellow on Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, found that studies asserting “gender-affirming” interventions prevent suicide failed to show a causal relationship. He also detailed the significant flaws in frequently cited studies.
When Greene applied a more robust model for assessing the impact of state policies allowing children to access gender transition treatment without parental permission, he found suicide increased.
By 2020, there are about 1.6 more suicides per 100,000 people ages 12 to 23 in states that have a policy allowing minors to access health care without parental consent than in states without such a policy. The average state suicide rate in this age group between 1999 and 2020 was 11.1, making an additional 1.6 suicides per 100,000 an increase of 14 percent in the suicide rate.
This increase in suicide rates in states where it is easier for minors to access puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones increased at almost the same time, and to the same degree, as those interventions became available.
This attempt by medical lobbying associations to pressure the DOJ into criminalizing opposition and Big Tech into stifling open scientific inquiry and debate is horrifying. If gender transition care for children is a net positive, activists and medical providers should be able to defend their practices in the public square. Advocates for transition services for minors should be able to champion their point of view free from violence and threats but not free from criticism and questions. And they certainly should not be free from having to hear their own words and see their marketing materials made available to the public for scrutiny.
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