About its transgender surgery program

Boston Children’s Hospital is claiming to be the victim in all this.

Boston Children’s Hospital has become the target of a harassment campaign based on inaccurate information about its transgender surgery program. Hospital staff say the campaign includes aggressive calls, emails and death threats for some providers.

Obviously there shouldn’t be threats, but “aggressive calls”? Define “aggressive.” Is it aggressive to say hospitals shouldn’t be performing medically unnecessary hysterectomies? Especially on girls age 18 or 19? Is it aggressive to say hospitals – especially children’s hospitals – shouldn’t be actively promoting and celebrating such elective surgeries?

“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,” the hospital said in a statement. “We are working with law enforcement to protect our clinicians, staff, patients, families, and the broader Boston Children’s community and hold the offenders accountable.”

The thing is, when “understanding and respect for our transgender community” turns out to mean mutilating people’s genitals, we start to wonder what incomprehension and disrespect would look like. We start to wonder how BCH can be so very confident that none of these young “patients” will ever come to regret having their genitals mutilated.

The campaign started last week with criticism of a video posted on the hospital’s website about hysterectomies. Several conservative social media accounts shared posts about the video on Twitter. The hospital performs hysterectomies on patients 18 and older, but not on children as some of the posts claimed.

There it is, you see: WBUR gives away what bad faith all this is by failing to spell out what kind of hysterectomies they’re talking about. These aren’t your medically necessary hysterectomies because of cancer or other medical issue, these are elective hysterectomies because of a socially-spread delusion that people can change sex. It’s funny that WBUR didn’t say that.

Surgeons at Boston Children’s have said they would consider performing other procedures, including phalloplasty, or penis construction, on 17-year-old male transgender patients. But hospital staff say that hasn’t happened because no 17-year-old has met required legal and other criteria.

Again. Say what? Penis construction? That’s a thing – a normal humdrum thing that you do on request? A bit of minor plastic surgery?

Never you mind, it’s only “the far right” who thinks it’s a bad idea to mangle people’s genitals for the sake of a fad.

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