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Woke medical establishment attacks foes of gender-affirming care

Ben Weingarten Federalist Senior Contributor; Claremont Institute Fellow
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Three leading medical organizations recently sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland asking the Department of Justice to investigate online attacks against hospitals that provide care to transgender children. Collectively the organizations represent more than 270,000 physicians and 220 children’s hospitals across the country. Straight Arrow News contributor Ben Weingarten argues that the woke medical establishment is “deputizing the DOJ to police disinformation” and punish those against “gender-affirming care.”

If its effort to sic the state and Big Tech on its critics is any indication, it seems the increasingly woke medical establishment now is not only ok potentially mutilating children, but with it, our free speech rights, in service of its lucrative “gender-affirming care” enterprise.

The American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics and Children’s Hospital Association recently delivered a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland calling for him to unleash the DOJ on foes of efforts to transition children—a new chapter in the War on “Wrongthink” we’ve been chronicling.

The AMA and its co-signers took a page out of the National School Board Association’s playbook

The play goes like this: When your radical positions are exposed, creating a backlash, claim it’s all disinformation, that the disinformation is dangerous, and that public and private authorities must go after the disinformers. The play is made even more effective when the authorities are already on your side, as was the case when it came to the NSBA and the Biden administration.

The AMA and its co-signers made their play by arguing that the doctors they represent, and the places they work, face coordinated attacks threaten[ing] federally protected rights to health care for patients 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.

Therefore, they added, “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.”

Wisely, unlike the NSBA, the medical organizations were vaguer about the purported threats their members are facing, and the powers they’re calling on the DOJ to use against their critics.

If its effort to sic the state and Big Tech on its critics is any indication, it seems the increasingly Woke medical establishment now is not only ok potentially mutilating children, but with it, our free speech rights, in service of its lucrative “gender-affirming care” enterprise.

The American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics and Children’s Hospital Association recently delivered a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland calling for him to unleash the DOJ on foes of efforts to transition children—a new chapter in the War on Wrongthink we’ve been chronicling.

The AMA and its co-signers took a page out of the National School Board Association’s playbook

The play goes like this: When your radical positions are exposed, creating a backlash, claim it’s all disinformation, that the disinformation is dangerous, and that public and private authorities must go after the disinformers.

The play is made even more effective when the authorities are already on your side, as was the case when it came to the NSBA and the Biden administration.

The AMA and its co-signers made their play by arguing that the doctors they represent, and the places they work, face: coordinated attacks threaten[ing] federally protected rights to health care for patients 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.

Therefore, they added, “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.”

Wisely, unlike the NSBA, the medical organizations were vaguer about the purported threats their members are facing, and the powers they’re calling on the DOJ to use against their critics.

They reference one bomb threat, note that children’s hospitals have been beefing up security, and say that “harassing” communications and “protestors” are creating an “elevated and justifiable fear among families, patients, and staff.” 

Unlike the NSBA, they provide no list of threatening acts that when examined fall apart, undermining their argument. Less specificity makes it harder to scrutinize the claims. 

Any threats or acts of violence of course should be pursued by authorities, but the content of the letter and the history of these kinds of letters makes this effort suspicious.

The AMA also didn’t invoke the Patriot Act or call on numerous national security offices to pursue critics, like the NSBA, so that did make the letter marginally less inflammatory.

But the message—delivered to an administration committed to promoting “gender-affirming care” on a global scale, that has harassed the likes of Alabama youth gender-alteration opponent Eagle Forum, and like-minded, censorious Big Tech—a message aimed equally if not more so at its targets—was clear.

With Americans averse to the growing, Biden -backed, often teacher-and doctor-supported push for gender dysphoric children to transition—even behind their parents’ backs—despite the dubiousness of the science, let alone parental rights, whether children are equipped to make these decisions, the long-term consequences, and the ethics here, the Ruling Class must intimidate them into silence and submission.

Americans can’t question any aspect of radical gender ideology, just like they can’t question the integrity of our elections, Chinese coronavirus policies, or CRT in schools.

Those who would dare do so, whether a Matt Walsh, mirror holder to leftist gender radicalism “Libs of Tik Tok,” activist organizations like Eagle Forum, or everyday parents right and left aghast at the push to give children puberty blockers, let alone genitalia surgeries, are to potentially face not just deplatforming, but the full force of the law. 

And that law, as we have seen most notably with abortion of late, is applied anything but equally. The medical establishment has put its opponents on notice. 

But its letter revealed three more things:

First: Woke organizations will collude with government and the private sector to punish dissenters no matter how sacrosanct and contentious the matter—down to altering the bodies of our kids.

Second: The state and the medical establishment are truly devoted to encouraging gender transitions for youths. That’s telling because beyond true belief, one can see nefarious motives at play. This issue allows the government to create a wedge between parents and children to be exploited; meanwhile, for doctors this is a profitable business its shown it wants to protect at all costs. 

Third: The Woke medical establishment has been corrupted. By seeking to deputize the DOJ and Big Tech to police “disinformation”—that is, challenges to gender-affirming orthodoxy—one of the most highly contentious, and again, dubious orthodoxies one could possibly imagine, the medical establishment is acting in the most anti-Scientific manners. Suppressing competing views is fatal to Science, and ultimately to us.

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