By Sarah Weaver
Hospitals and medical centers exposed for performing questionable treatments on gender-confused minors, including sex change surgeries and chemical castration, consistently rushed to memory-hole publicly available information on their websites.
While reporters and investigators may not have much trouble re-locating these pages through internet archives, the general public will have a harder time. Thus, hospitals that cover their tracks by deleting information they were once ostensibly proud to share may very well succeed in deflecting criticism of their policies.
“It’s telling that several children’s hospitals have tried to cover their tracks when their ghoulish surgery on minors is exposed,” Jay Richards, a research fellow at the Heritage Foundation told the Daily Caller. “What is bizarre, however, is that the exposure is not the result of some hidden camera operation. In virtually every case, it is their own online videos and ad copy that is getting held up to scrutiny, usually by online critics such as Libs of Tik Tok. And the criticism often amounts to little more than showing people what these hospitals say they’re doing in their own advertisements.”
Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s trans clinic provides children “trans buddies” who monitor doctors who “misgender” patients, a fact they openly discuss on their website. After reports, the center initially entirely removed its trans clinic from its website, but later restored the site after the media firestorm had subsided. Matt Walsh’s report also showed that the center was committed to providing hormones to children as young as 13. Explicit mention of this fact is, as of this writing, removed from Vanderbilt’s website, but can be viewed through an archived version of the page.
Vanderbilt University refused multiple requests from the Daily Caller for explanation of these actions.
BREAKING: After my report, Vanderbilt’s transgender clinic has deleted their entire website. Literally the whole thing. They’re removing everything. pic.twitter.com/9kAbORA7OY
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) September 21, 2022
Libs of TikTok recorded an employee at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., claiming the facility would provide hysterectomies to a 16-year-old in August. After the report, the hospital released a statement saying it does not “provide gender-affirming surgery for anyone under the age of 18,” and scrubbed its web pages of mention that it would perform “gender-affirming” hysterectomies on individuals under 21 years old. (RELATED: ‘Stochastic Terrorism’ Is The Newest Way The Left Plans To Censor Dissent)
Children’s National, however, claims this sudden reversal is a necessary response to potential death threats which could be issued against individuals at the hospital in response to the reports. The hospital also claims the wording of their website was misleading, and such services were not provided at their hospital.
“One of our web pages was poorly designed and listed medical services in a confusing manner,” the hospital told the Daily Caller. “When we learned of the death threats being made against teams at another children’s hospital, we assessed that page and made adjustments to ensure the information was clear and accurate. We did not want a poorly crafted web page to put our team in danger.”
But activist and mathematician James Lindsay says hospitals are covering their tracks because they didn’t predict the public backlash to the medical services they perform.
“[T]hey know people are against it, but because they think they have what amounts to a divine mandate to do it, they have to do it more secretly,” Lindsay told the Daily Caller. “They’re ‘on the run’ from scrutiny because they know it will get them shut down.”
Richards also said that the hospital’s reaction to exposure is rooted in a lack of self-awareness as to how unpopular the medical operations they perform on children really are.
“My sense is that these hospitals and gender clinics are so thoroughly enclosed in their own ideological bubble they at some level don’t realize how monstrous their activity really is,” Richards told the Daily Caller. “The visceral public reaction takes them by surprise when it’s exposed to a wider audience, they panic and try to hide what the day before they were advertising.”
Publicly available videos of doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital promoting “gender-affirming” hysterectomies, the surgical removal of a female’s uterus, surfaced in August. After backlash, the video is no longer publicly available. In October, a video surfaced of the hospital claiming that babies know their gender identity “from the womb.” The video was later deleted. (RELATED: NBC Journalist Who Attacked Libs Of TikTok Once Took Credit For Deplatforming Pedophile Sting Groups)
Boston Children’s Hospital (@BostonChildrens) is now offering “gender affirming hysterectomies” for young girls pic.twitter.com/JOH5fFtGJ0
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) August 11, 2022
The website of the Boston Children’s Center for Gender Surgery originally stated that it offered vaginoplasty, metoidioplasty and phalloplasty chest reconstruction, breast augmentation and “facial harmonization” surgeries to “adolescents and young adults” as young as 17. After reports, the original guidance can only be accessed through an internet archive. The hospital’s current website says, “all genital surgeries are only performed on patients age 18 and older.” This quiet rewriting of history allowed Politifact to fact-check concerns about the hospital offering irreversible surgeries to minors as “false” by relying only on the newly-updated guidance.
Boston Children’s Hospital did not respond to the Daily Caller’s repeated requests for comment for this report.
Ginny Gentles, director of Education Freedom Center at the Independent Women’s Forum, told the Daily Caller that despite their efforts, “the clinics can’t hide the evidence” as “public awareness and concern is growing rapidly.”
“The gender clinic videos are saved before sharing them with the public and detransitioners are openly discussing the medical abuse they have endured,” Gentles said.
“In a sense this gives me hope, because it suggests these clinics are double-minded,” Richards said about whether hospitals will be successful in memory-holing the operations they perform on children. “At one level, they come to believe they’re actually helping troubled teens. But at another level, they know, or come to realize despite themselves, that their actions are shameful and must be hidden.”
“In any case, critics of this work need to be diligent, and to make sure that these clinics don’t continue pursuing ‘gender affirming care,’ without advertising that fact,” Richards said.
