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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.
Hers wasn’t the only clinic having a hard time in 2021. The LGBTQ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign has calculated that, last year, conservative lawmakers introduced over 130 anti-trans bills into state legislatures—including 35 that explicitly limited the ability of trans and gender-expansive youth to access gender-affirming care, a term that refers to holistic psychological and medical care that affirms a person’s gender identity. As of Feb. 11, the ACLU has tracked similar bills in at least 17 state legislatures this year.
Only a small group of pediatricians provide such care in the U.S., and, in this political context, those who do are often finding themselves at the receiving end of growing harassment—even as research confirms the potentially life-saving nature of the work they do. Demonstrators have organized protests like the ones at Sequeira’s clinic at other sites across the country; in Ohio, billboards have been rented spreading disinformation about affirming care—including one near a children’s hospital. Pediatricians tell TIME they have received threatening mail, have been impersonated online and have feared for their safety. And they worry such harassment campaigns could…
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Source : time
