Security

Trans healthcare providers are being harassed by conservatives.

That is something I never thought about until one day I got a phone, “Good morning Miss ______, I am a reporter from [name of newspaper] and I am doing a story on the non-discrimination bill.” My response was “How did you get my phone number?”

There is enough information on the internet about me for him to find my phone number and address!

Pediatricians Who Serve Trans Youth Face Increasing Harassment. Lifesaving Care Could Be on the Line
Time
By Madeleine Carlise
February 16, 2022


Dr. Gina Sequeira first saw the protesters on a bright clear morning last September. A co-director of Seattle Children’s Gender Clinic who provides gender-affirming care to young people, Sequeira had confronted ignorance about her medical specialty in the past. But nothing had prepared her to see people outside her office, waving signs and handing out flyers warning of the “dangers” of the work she does.

“That was really, really hard for us as a clinic,” she says. “And I think it was really hard for the hospital’s patients and families who witnessed it.” Just a month later, protesters showed up again.

[…]

“I was taken aback, and really kind of fearful,” Sequeira recalls. She’d seen colleagues who provided abortion receive similar abuse. But she never thought her work could become nearly as controversial. “It really made me wonder what the future of our work looks like,” she says. “Is that the path we’re going down?”

Not only are the conservatives trying to pass anti-trans legislation but the right-wing media are fanning the fire of hate.

Mis- and disinformation about trans people has also gained airtime in conservative media, especially online. A Nov. 9 report from Media Matters found that 77% of the top-performing trans-related Facebook posts between Oct. 2020 and Sept. 2021 were on right-leaning pages, as were nearly two-thirds of all the interactions on posts about trans issues.

“There’s nothing grassroots about this at all,” argues Imara Jones, journalist and founder of TransLash Media, whose podcast the Anti-Trans Hate Machine has documented the rapid rise of anti-trans legislation in recent years. “This is a highly organized movement that is targeting trans people and trans rights.”’

As they stir the fires of hate healthcare providers and activists are becoming targets of their, just like their political pun dents they talk shows are only interested in profit, the more “clicks” that they get the more revenue comes in to their stations… viewership and ad revenue is all they care about. They don’t care about the harm they are doing and they probably revel in it because it means more “clicks” on their website or listen to their broadcasts.

This focus on gender-affirming pediatricians has extended beyond legislation. As disinformation and fearmongering about trans youth has surged, TIME has spoken with numerous providers who say they’ve witnessed a rise in harassment in the past two years—whether via in-person protests, online threats and cyberbullying, menacing mail, attempts to cut their research’s funding or even their medical licenses. Other gender-affirming pediatricians with whom TIME spoke refused entirely to go on the record, citing fears about the risk of violence against them and their families.

“This is shocking, shocking, shocking,” says Dr. Robert Garofalo, the head of adolescent and young adult medicine at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. “No one is prepared for this, and pediatric institutions aren’t prepared for it.”

[...]

Things have gotten worse. In the spring of 2021, her clinic received threats about protests. In the fall of 2021, the protests actually happened. “It really made us evaluate our safety systems for our patients, families, and staff,” she says. Susan says that she’s repeatedly been threatened with being reported to her state’s medical licensing board—though her care is not in violation of any policies—and adds that she knows gender-affirming mental-health clinicians who have faced similar harassment.

The fear is there that it will go far beyond harassing phone calls and letters to threats of violence.

On my blog you will not find my last name anywhere, nor my contact information. Why? Because I was getting hate mail and surprisingly a lot of it came from the trans community because of my belief that the trans umbrella covers everyone from drag queens and kings to post-op. Some trans people are very adamant that you have to be post-op to be trans and everyone else are “just men in dresses.”

When I post my blog on Facebook I just post to “friends.” and if I do a vanity search on Google I get “About 3,080,000 results (0.47 seconds)” of course not all of them are of me but it is scary none the lass.

Security was something that I never thought about until now.