Under increasing public scrutiny, hospitals and medical centers that perform controversial “gender-affirming” procedures on minors are now scrambling to purge their digital paper trail.
In September, conservative media commentator Matt Walsh and his Daily Wire team exposed Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s transgender clinic for its services to minors, some as young as thirteen years old. These “treatments” include pubertal blocking—using the same drugs used for chemical castration.
The clinic also provides surgeries for minors, including double mastectomies on adolescent girls. Dr. Shayne Taylor, an Assistant Pediatrics professor and physician at the clinic, emphasized in a 2018 lecture that these surgeries are a “big money maker” for the hospital.
After public scrutiny began, the Vanderbilt transgender clinic expunged all mention of hormone treatment or chemical castration procedures from its pediatric transgender clinic website. The archived version reveals the deception.
But the Vanderbilt clinic is not alone. In August, an employee at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C. claimed that the institution would provide hysterectomies to a sixteen-year-old girl, according to a report by the Daily Caller. Before the media attention, the hospital advertised “gender-affirming hysterectomy” as a service available to patients between the ages of zero and twenty-four years old. The hospital has since eliminated all references to this service on its website.
When Fox News asked with the hospital why the previous webpage included the “gender-affirming” hysterectomies for children, the spokesperson said “that was a flaw in the design of our website” and denied that the hospital provides “gender-affirming surgery for anyone under the age of 18.” Yet, the testimony of an employee disputes this claim.
On August 17th, Boston Children’s Center for Gender Surgery website, explained that “all genital surgeries are only performed on patients age 18 and older.” Yet, the same website just days earlier stated: “To qualify for gender affirmation at Boston Children’s Hospital, you must be at least 18 years old for phalloplasty or metoidioplasty and at least 17 years old for vaginoplasty.” Why the change? On August 14th, an investigative reporter with the Daily Wire released a report exposing the hospital. The revision is a clear contradiction of its earlier position and evidence that the facility was willing to perform at least one of these surgeries on a minor.
As public scrutiny increases on facilities that offer irreversible “gender-affirming” care to minors, these same facilities work to purge evidence of the past to control the narrative in the present, making accountability even more difficult.
