The Boston Children’s Hospital has become the target of what it called a ‘misinformation’ campaign. (Lane Turner/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
A children’s hospital has been met with a wave of death threats and abuse after a “misinformation” campaign by right-wing media and Libs of TikTok.
On 10 August, The Post Millenial reported that the Center Gender Surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital “gleefully encourages surgical, pharmaceutical ‘gender transition’ for teens”.
Libs of Tiktok, which reposts LGBTQ+ content with cruel comments and often, claimed on 11 August: “Boston Children’s Hospital is now offering ‘gender-affirming hysterectomies’ for young girls.”
Both included a video of an attending physician at the pediatric centre describing gender-affirming hysterectomies, which see a person’s uterus, cervix and fallopian tubes removed. The video has since been made private.
Libs of TikTok has since sought to “spread the horrors of what doctors are doing to young, confused individuals”, it said in a newsletter sent Tuesday (16 August).
The account, run by Brooklyn real estate agent Chaya Raichik, tweeted and retweeted more than a dozen times about the centre. Many fired back against fack-checkers that stressed that, no, the Boston Children’s Hospital does not offer such treatments to young trans people.
Because facts are meaningless in the anti-trans world, the trumped-up claims were unsurprisingly pushed by a who’s who of conservative influencers and single-issue activists.
They included Chris Elston, who spends his days wearing sandwich boards bearing anti-trans slogans, and The Daily Wire‘s Matt Walsh.
Anti-trans activists harassed Boston Children’s Hospital doctors, calling and emailing them and leaving threatening messages on their social media accounts.
Vice reported trolls on a pro-Donald Trump messaging board TheDonald.win threatened to “execute” the doctors while many clogged their online pages with negative reviews.
Boston’s Children’s said in a statement Tuesday (16 August) “Boston Children’s does not — and will not — perform a hysterectomy as part of gender-affirming care on a patient under the age of 18.
“In response to commentary last week critical of our Gender Multispecialty Service (GeMS) Program, Boston Children’s Hospital has been the target of a large volume of hostile internet activity, phone calls, and harassing emails including threats of violence towards our clinicians and staff,” it added.
“We are deeply concerned by these attacks on our clinicians and staff fueled by misinformation and a lack of understanding and respect for our transgender community.
“We condemn these attacks in the strongest possible terms, and we reject the false narratives upon which they are based.”
The hospital said it is working with police “to protect our clinicians, staff, patients, families, and the broader Boston Children’s Hospital community and hold the offenders accountable”.
Boston Children’s Hospital has since beefed up security and issued guidance for staff on how to better protect themselves, NBC News reported.
The hospital houses the Gender Multispecialty Service, the nation’s “first pediatric and adolescent transgender health programme” that has treated more than 1,000 families, according to its homepage.
The separate Center for Gender Surgery strictly provides treatments to “eligible adolescents and young adults“. The age of consent for gender-affirming procedures is 18.
The centre’s page on trans reproductive health services states: “We only perform gender-affirming hysterectomies on patients who are age 18 or older.
The hospital also follows medical guidelines by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which advises against surgical treatment for children.
Libs of Tiktok has been credited with inspiring Florida’s controversial ‘Don’t Say Gay‘ bill and deepening the lurch by lawmakers across the US to old-fashioned homophobia by comparing LGBTQ+ people to “groomers”, according to an analysis by watchdog Media Matters for America.