Boston Children’s Hospital said it had received “threats of violence against our clinicians and staff” after false claims were made online that the hospital offers genital surgeries to minors.
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Lane Turner/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
Boston Children’s Hospital said it had received “threats of violence against our clinicians and staff” after false claims were made online that the hospital offers genital surgeries to minors.
Lane Turner/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
Hospitals and doctors across the country are facing harassment and even death threats for the medical care they provide to transgender children. In many cases, they have been the subject of tweets from a Twitter account called Libs of TikTok, as well as stories in conservative media that portray gender grooming as child abuse and mutilation.
Which begs the question: where should social networks draw the line with accounts promoting narratives that fuel harassment campaigns on their platforms and beyond?
National Children’s Hospital in Washington, DC became the latest target this week when Libs of TikTok posted an audio recording in which hospital staff appeared to say that gender-affirming hysterectomies had been performed on minors. The hospital said that this claim was incorrect and that none of the people registered provide care to patients.
“The information in the registry is not accurate. We do not and have never performed gender-confirming hysterectomies on anyone under the age of 18,” Children’s National said in a statement to NPR. “The operator who spoke gave incorrect information.”
The statement continued: “Since the spread of misinformation on Twitter, we have been the target of a large volume of hostile and threatening phone calls and emails.”
Children’s hospitals in Boston, Seattle, Chicago and Portland, Oregon, are also targeted. Last week, Boston Children’s Hospital warned it was receiving “a large volume of hostile online activity, harassing phone calls and emails, including threats of violence against our doctors and staff” after false claims that it performed genital surgeries on minors.
The US Department of Justice even weighed in, with the US Attorney for Massachusetts calling the attacks “disturbing”.
False claims, videos out of context
These false narratives about gender-affirming pediatric care are rooted in fundamental “misperceptions,” said Dr. Angela Kade Goepferd, a pediatrician and director of the Minnesota Gender Health Program for Children.
“People have misperceptions that we are doing surgery on young children. People have misperceptions that we are changing children from boys to girls at a very young age,” they said.
They said care for transgender children is wide-ranging, from efforts to help children transition socially to puberty-blocking medications to various gender-affirming surgeries, and is undertaken with input from pediatric psychologists, clinical social workers, hormones and endocrinologists, like as well as families.
Some of the allegations involving Children’s National Hospital, Boston Children’s and other hospitals were prompted by the Libs TikTok account, which regularly reposts videos and social media posts from LGBTQ people, teachers, schools and other institutions. The clips are sometimes taken out of context and framed to incite anger or mock LGBTQ and anti-racism causes, in what the account owner described as “exposés” of “lunatics”.
For example, a short clip about gender-confirming hysterectomies from a video originally posted by Boston Children’s that Libs of TikTok reposted does not mention the age of the patients. But the Libs of TikTok tweeted alongside the clip the false claim that the hospital offers the surgery “for young girls”.
Libs of TikTok, run by a Brooklyn woman named Chaya Raichik, has 1.3 million followers on its largest platform, Twitter. It has gained prominence and influence in right-wing circles over the past year as conservatives increasingly try to use anti-LGBTQ sentiment to gain support.
NPR contacted Raichik for this story. She initially responded and agreed to an interview, but did not respond to a follow-up message. Raichik often condemns criticism of her online activities as attempts to “nullify and silence” her. She said that she was also the target of death threats.
Platforms fight bullying networks
Twitter and Facebook prohibit harassment and bullying, mass coordinated attacks and incitement to violence. Both companies prohibit the use of the word “groomer” as a slur against LGBTQ people under their anti-hate speech rules.
Platforms have removed some of the threats to hospitals. But it’s less clear how much responsibility companies can or will place on accounts that draw attention to targets that end up being harassed.
Twitter previously temporarily suspended Libs of TikTok for violating its rules. The company declined to comment on the account. Following threats reported by Boston Children’s Hospital, Libs of TikTok said it had been permanently suspended by Facebook for violating the platform’s community standards. But that was quickly changed and the account reverted to the Facebook post, saying the social network said it was a mistake. Facebook declined to comment on the suspension.
TikTok’s libs seem to have avoided outright bans by pushing the limits of the platforms’ rules, but not breaking them. The account does not explicitly encourage followers to threaten anyone and usually uses its target’s words, sometimes taken out of context, to imply wrongdoing.
But while his individual posts may adhere to the letter of the platforms’ rules, their cumulative effect is what worries scholars like Joan Donovan, who studies online extremism, media manipulation and disinformation at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center for the Media. Politics and Public Policy.
“We’ve reached this stage in social media where people know what to do when an account like Libs and TikTok calls out another account or a person or institution,” she said. The calls can spark harassment campaigns known as “brigading,” where commenters gang up on a common target.
In the case of children’s hospitals, “threats have gone from insulting people or targeting accounts online to more direct threats,” Donovan said. “Online bullying escalates very quickly into offline violence when we start seeing these patterns of attack.”
For social networks to deal with what Donovan calls “network nudges,” she says effectively tracking these threats means looking beyond single posts on specific platforms.
“Precipitating comments may not be that inflammatory, but if it creates a pattern of attack that is recognizable, which is with an account like Libs and TikTok, then these companies are within their jurisdiction to warn and then ban the account .”
Right-wing groups target LGBTQ events, education and health care
Pediatricians and children’s hospitals are just the latest targets of right-wing outrage, in a new iteration of the decades-old slander of gays, lesbians and transgender people as pedophiles or “groomers.”
“The Libs TikTok account has been a major player in driving many of the harassment campaigns we’ve seen over the past year,” said Ari Drennen, director of the LGBTQ program at Media Matters for America, the liberal advocacy group.
In some cases, events and images published by the Libs of TikTok have been targeted offline by right-wing extremists known for their strife.
On a single day this summer, for example, men with ties to the white nationalist group Patriot Front were arrested outside a Pride event in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, and alleged members of the far-right Proud Boys knocked down a drag queen story hour. at a library in San Lorenzo, California, Libs of TikTok had tweeted about both events, although there is no conclusive link between the posts and the activities of extremist groups.
like Washington Post reported in April, the account’s subjects and posts are regularly featured and promoted by other conservative influencers and media figures, including podcaster Joe Rogan. Raichik has appeared on Tucker Carlson’s main Fox News show.
The growing stigmatization of transgender medical care has doctors worried.
“This is a developmentally appropriate, team-based approach that gives children time to understand their identity,” said Dr. Goepferd of Children’s Minnesota.
Threats to hospitals are exploding, affecting not only hospital staff, but also patients and families seeking all types of care, as well as the long-term research needed in the field. “I worry that this kind of false narrative would make research institutions or funders nervous about funding more research to find out what is the best possible care we can provide right now,” Goepferd said.
“The fact that the message has gotten out somewhere that it’s okay to attack doctors, pediatricians, children’s hospitals in this way is just a really disturbing social trend,” they said.
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