Republicans Sound Alarm About DOJ Transgender ‘Disinformation’ Letter

Three nationwide medical organizations despatched a letter to the Division of Justice below President Joe Biden, urging the division to “examine and prosecute” these chargeable for an alleged “marketing campaign of disinformation” about controversial transgender medical interventions, which the organizations blamed for a rise in bomb threats to medical services.

Republican senators responded with their very own letter to DOJ Monday, suggesting that the letter represents an alarming pattern of the federal government “quashing or criminalizing civic discourse.”

Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas; Roger Marshall, R-Kan.; Mike Lee, R-Utah; Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn.; and Ron Johnson, R-Wis., requested Lawyer Basic Merrick Garland whether or not he or DOJ officers below him solicited the letter, which the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Affiliation, and the Kids’s Hospital Affiliation despatched on Oct. 4.

Additionally they cited a infamous Sept. 24, 2001, letter from the Nationwide Faculty Boards Affiliation, which urged DOJ to research dad and mom who protested COVID-19 measures and demanding race concept ideas at faculties, evaluating such dad and mom to home terrorists. Paperwork later revealed that Training Secretary Miguel Cardona requested that letter. (The college boards affiliation later retracted the letter and apologized.)

The well being organizations’ Oct. 4 letter urged DOJ to “examine the organizations, people, and entities coordinating, scary, and finishing up bomb threats and threats of private violence in opposition to youngsters’s hospitals and physicians throughout the U.S.”

The letter traced the bomb threats to “an intentional marketing campaign of disinformation, wherein a couple of high-profile customers on social media share false and deceptive info focusing on particular person physicians and hospitals, ensuing a fast escalation of threats, harassment, and disruption of care.”

“Our organizations have known as on expertise firms to do extra to stop this observe on digital platforms, and we now urge your workplace to take swift motion to research and prosecute all organizations, people, and entities accountable,” the well being organizations wrote.

The senators didn’t help the bomb threats and moderately famous that “violence and threats usually are not protected speech and ought to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the regulation.” But they warned that “the problem of how greatest to deal with minors battling their gender dysphoria is the topic of ongoing and emotional debate, which Individuals have a protected First Modification proper to totally have interaction in.”

The controversy traces again to reviews that Boston Kids’s Hospital’s Heart for Gender Surgical procedure performs mastectomies on youngsters as younger as 15, and since-deleted wording on the hospital’s web site claiming that teenagers as younger as 17 can get vaginoplasties.

Chaya Raichik, who runs the favored Libs of TikTok Twitter account, additionally captured audio suggesting that Kids’s Nationwide Hospital in Washington, D.C., presents such interventions for teenagers. Raichik requested an operator on the hospital whether or not her (hypothetical) 16-year-old daughter may obtain a “gender-affirming hysterectomy.” The operator stated, “Now we have all totally different sort[s] of age teams that are available in for that” process, and added, “I’ve seen youthful youngsters.”

A Kids’s Nationwide Hospital spokesperson instructed The Each day Sign, “We don’t present gender-affirming surgical procedure for anybody below the age of 18.”

Whereas transgender activists and well being organizations declare that no minors endure transgender surgical procedure, quite a few research in medical journals have recounted that irreversible transgender surgical procedures have been carried out on minors, because the The Christian Put up’s Brandon Showalter reported.

Professional-transgender activists have condemned Raichik’s Twitter posts, together with different posts about such controversial transgender interventions carried out on youngsters, as a type of “stochastic terrorism,” and the medical organizations’ letter seems to reference these social media posts.

Of their letter, the Republican senators famous that the Oct. 4 letter seems to comply with a pattern. After the varsity boards affiliation despatched a letter final yr calling on the Justice Division to focus on involved dad and mom, the division issued a memorandum on Oct. 4, 2021, directing the FBI to research threats in opposition to faculty boards.

“Your actions in regard to the NSBA letter despatched an inappropriate message that federal regulation enforcement can and shall be used to assist one aspect of a political debate, and to both silence or chill the speech of the opposite,” the Republicans wrote. “Now, in a remarkably related trend, medical associations have written to you asking you to once more deal with any speech vital of their place on a delicate matter of public coverage as a bodily risk warranting a regulation enforcement response.”

“The weaponization of federal regulation enforcement companies just like the DOJ, with a view to produce most well-liked coverage outcomes, can’t proceed — our democracy will depend on it,” the senators wrote.

They set a Nov. 1 demand for solutions to the questions whether or not Garland solicited the Oct. 4 letter, whether or not Garland or a Division of Justice worker had engaged with the well being organizations concerning the letter earlier than it was despatched, and whether or not partaking in an “intentional marketing campaign of disinformation” is a prosecutable offense.

Medical interventions can have harmful lifelong impacts. Even “therapies” that come wanting surgical alterations can have harmful long-lasting outcomes. So-called puberty blockers, for instance, truly introduce a illness right into a affected person’s physique, in response to Dr. Michael Laidlaw, an endocrinologist in Rocklin, California. Hypogonadotropic hypogonadism happens when the mind fails to ship the fitting sign to the gonads to make the hormones vital for improvement. 

“An endocrinologist would possibly deal with a situation the place a feminine’s testosterone ranges are going to be outdoors the traditional vary,” Laidlaw instructed PJ Media. “We’ll deal with that, and we’re conscious of metabolic issues. On the similar time, an endocrinologist could also be giving excessive ranges of testosterone to a feminine to ‘transition’ her.” Cross-sex hormones can even have severe long-term uncomfortable side effects, growing the chance of osteoporosis and cardiovascular occasions.

Medical associations echo transgender activist teams and defend such interventions as vital to stop a minor’s suicide, but the analysis on any constructive results of such interventions stays inconclusive.

Neither the Division of Justice nor the American Academy of Pediatrics nor the Kids’s Hospital Affiliation responded to The Each day Sign’s request for remark by publication. The American Medical Affiliation requested extra time to remark and this text shall be up to date with any response.

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