Texas Hospitals Besieged by Activists Bent on Ending Trans Youth Healthcare
Determined to end affirming care for youth in Texas by any means necessary, anti-trans activists have shared leaks of confidential patient documents and misleading videos from Project Veritas targeting specific doctors and hospitals and closing treatment programs.
by Evan Urquhart
Activists are rabidly attempting to end all treatment for gender dysphoric youth in Texas, even before a likely ban on such care finishes making its way through the legislature. Using leaked patient records and video from Project Veritas the campaign has combined broad misinformation about the safety and efficacy of gender-affirming care with efforts to target specific hospitals and doctors, further increasing the desperation of families with transgender children. The campaign has already resulted in the sudden departure of physicians who previously staffed the adolescent medical clinic at Dell Children’s Hospital in Austin.
The Project Veritas video, which was used to intimidate Dell Children’s into abruptly ending all provision of gender-affirming care, has been described by the right wing press as proving that doctors “routinely” approve puberty blockers for kids “as young as 8.” Many children who start puberty at 8 would qualify as experiencing precocious puberty, a condition which laws banning the use of puberty blockers for gender dysphoria have made explicit exceptions for.
screenshot from the National Review
The video itself is similar to other videos by Project Veritas, who are known for undercover stings conducted to advance conservative causes, and for employing misleading edits which distort the meaning and intent of those whose words they capture. This particular video is choppily edited, and intersperses brief clips of what appears to be hidden camera footage of discussions with providers in with false or misleading statements about gender-affirming care by conservative activists. At the beginning of the video a woman described as a social worker at Dell Children’s says “We do have patients who are starting as young as eight/nine, we have a list of gender-affirming therapists that we can provide, too.” Project Veritas’ captions claim the worker is referring to starting “transgender treatments,” but there is nothing to substantiate that in the video, and the organization has a long history of lying about their footage in similar incidents.
Among the activists featured is the outgoing president of the American College of Pediatrics, Quentin Van Meter, who falsely claims that gender-affirming providers push treatments on families. (Investigations of this sort of allegation about gender-affirming providers have previously found the opposite, with affirming providers moving slowly and parents always having the final say on treatment.) ACPeds is an organization of conservative doctors, designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Their ideologically motivated campaigns against adoption by LGBTQ+ parents, abortion, and transgender medical care have been unusually well-documented due to a recent accidental leak of many of their internal documents.
More recently, a purported leak of patient records from Texas Children’s Hospital has been touted by conservative activist Chris Rufo, who posted about the leak on Twitter and wrote about it for City Journal, a website for the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. Rufo claims that two doctors at Texas Children’s treated a handful of young patients with gender dysphoria. He called for “severe consequences” for Texas Children’s, who are accused of having two doctors that quietly continued to prescribe lawful, appropriate medical treatments after the hospital stated that it was ceasing to providing such treatments to patients.
screenshot from City Journal
It is impossible to know from Rufo’s documents what went on in these cases. Many of them seem to show patients being maintained on a puberty blocking implant they had been provided previously. Texas Children’s stated it would no longer ber providing puberty blockers or hormone therapy to minors last year, after the governor and attorney general threatened to investigate parents who consented to affirming-care for child abuse. Texas’ child welfare agency was subsequently blocked from conducting investigations into parents of trans youth on this basis. The documents have the names of the patients crudely obscured with red marks, but seem to include the dates and times of appointments as well as notes on diagnosis and treatment, which may be considered personally identifying information.
Taken together, the relentless attempt to hound doctors and hospitals out of providing legal and necessary treatment for gender dysphoria has resulted in a climate of terror among parents of trans youth in Texas, who are desperate to secure treatment for their children. Such families are often reluctant to speak publicly out of a desire to show deference to providers who have helped their families, and to protect their children’s privacy including their private medical records, according to sources familiar with networks of parents of trans youth in Texas. Such families represent an ongoing national shame as the naked political persectution of them by their state government continues uninterrupted.