Attacks against doctors, hospitals, and even suicide prevention hotlines are becoming common due to right-wing influencers expanding their campaign against the LGBTQ+ community.
Earlier this week, the Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH), a hospital that routinely ranks as one of the top pediatric medical clinics in the United States, was the victim of a bomb threat. This is after weeks of anti-LGBTQ influencers targeting the hospital with misinformation for their gender-affirming healthcare services for trans youth.
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“The hospital was the target of a bomb threat,” a hospital spokespeople said in a statement. “We are relieved no bomb was found and that employees and patients are safe. We remain vigilant in our efforts to battle the spread of false information about the hospital and our caregivers.”
At the heart of the campaign is misinformation about how the hospital treats trans youth. In particular, it’s the false idea that the hospital is performing gender-confirming hysterectomies on minors—an idea that has been spread by several right-wing figures with large followings.
The campaign is in the middle of a wider movement by the far-right that’s seeing doctors, activists, and essentially, anyone surrounding the LGBTQ community smeared as pedophilic “groomers.” Sara Aniano, a disinformation analyst at the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Center on Extremism, said the ADL has had difficulty tracking the harassment because it has extended to so many hospitals and doctors.
“It’s harder to track when it becomes so widespread,” said Aniano. “Because at first it seems like maybe it was just limited to one hospital, but then it just kind of exploded from there. It does seem like once these groups latch onto a strategy, they try to apply that strategy to as many circumstances as possible because it benefits their narrative, but it makes it look like it’s this widespread, systemic problem even though hospitals continue to debunk their claims.”
According to ADL, the harassment against the Boston hospital began at the start of August as the result of right-wing Twitter users reacting to promotional material the hospital made for its gender-affirming care. The users then began to spread the idea they were performing gender-affirming surgeries on children which they dubbed “child mutilation”. Despite statements from the hospital as well as multiple fact-checks confirming these surgeries are not available to anyone under 18, countless posts, videos, and memes have been made to further spread this false notion.
On August 16, the hospital put out a statement debunking the information and saying it has “a large volume of hostile internet activity, phone calls, and harassing emails, including threats of violence toward our clinicians and staff.”
“We condemn these attacks in the strongest possible terms, and we reject the false narrative upon which they are based,” their statement said.
The bomb threat remains under investigation.
While these attacks are being amplified by mainstream right-wing influencers like Fox News host Tucker Carlson, far-right Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene, and the online account Libs of TikTok, two figures at the heart of the resurgence of anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, they’re also being accelerated by antisemitic and neo-Nazi actors.
“I don’t think people really understand quite how deeply rooted transphobia and antisemitism are together,” said Aniano. She added the Boston Children’s Hospital being targeted as far back as 2007 when neo-Nazi forums spread antisemitic conspiracies about the doctor who founded the hospital’s Gender Management Service Clinic. The language they saw back then was remarkably similar to what can be found now.
“I was surprised to find it as far back as that, because I think the people treat this like a new issue,” said Aniano. “Certainly it’s quite salient as these conversations around gender-affirming care become more widespread as does the hate speech that surrounds them and that’s really tragic.”
Right-wing influencers have, unsurprisingly, started to imply that the attacks are false flags made to make them look bad. The man who runs the the right-wing website Babylon Bee is even offering $20,000 for the identity of the person behind the bomb threat against BCH.
While Boston Children’s Hospital is a primary target at the moment, the harassment extends further. Racist and anti-LGBTQ trolls on 4chan led a campaign against the Trevor Project, a suicide prevention hotline for LGBTQ youth, earlier this week. In posts first reported on by Media Matters Alex Kaplan, the trolls posted screenshots of them taking up counsellors’ time and instructing users how to clog up the system.
“If this causes a single (slur for trans person) to kill themselves, I will be pleased,” one said. “Total Aryan victory.”
A Trevor Project spokesperson confirmed to BuzzFeed News that trolls “inundated our crisis services” and described the action as “appalling.”
One North American trans figure has decided to leave their country after a harassment campaign. The trans Steamer, who goes by the name Keffels, was swatted at her home of London, Ontario, and has been at the center of a campaign so intense she and her family decided to move out of Canada for Europe.
“Any time there is a target, there is always the threat of offline violence. So we have to treat it seriously as though that threat is present all the time,” Aniano said. “Trans individuals are scared. Doctors are scared. Teachers are scared. And they have a reason to be.”
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