Tennessee GOP urges pediatric clinic to stop providing gender-affirming surgeries
The letter signed by the legislature's House Republican Caucus was prompted by a viral blog post from a far-right website.
A group of GOP lawmakers in Tennessee sent a letter Wednesday to Vanderbilt University Medical Center calling on the hospital’s Pediatric Transgender Clinic — the only one of its kind in the state — to stop providing gender-affirming surgeries.
In the letter, addressed to the chair of the hospital’s board of directors, state Rep. Jason Zachary and more than 60 of his Republican colleagues say they have been “alarmed by recent reports” that they say describe “surgical mutilations of minor children” at the clinic.
“The Vanderbilt Pediatric Transgender Clinic’s practices qualify as nothing less than abuse,” the letter says.
It’s the latest in a series of reactions, many of which are explicitly transphobic, to a Twitter thread that went viral last week from right-wing pundit Matt Walsh. In the tweets, Walsh said his “investigation” had uncovered that the hospital “drugs, chemically castrates, and performs double mastectomies on minors.” Walsh has a history of anti-LGBTQ activism and hosts a podcast for the far-right blog The Daily Wire.
The day after Walsh published the tweets, Vanderbilt University Medical Center released a statement saying the social media posts and videos misrepresented facts about the care the hospital provides its transgender patients.
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