Dangerous and Unconscionable Incitement

One of a series of posts from the legislator on X. The images, which the legislator shared the following day on Facebook, were unredacted in her posts and comments.

Last Wednesday, the current representative of Colorado House District 39 took to social media and in a series of posts incited her followers to harass (or worse) doctors who had testified against a bill that she supports. She suggested that greed motivated the doctors to participate in and advocate for “medical experimentation to mutilate and sterilize children” and expressed her eagerness that they be “charged and placed in jail.” Having provided names, pictures, and other identifying information about them, she exhorted her followers to “let them know how you feel!”

Consider context for the legislator’s pronouncements. A 2023 paper in the Journal of Adolescent Health (“Adolescent Providers’ Experiences of Harassment Related to Delivering Gender-Affirming Care”) shared the following findings of a survey of 117 adolescent gender-affirming care providers:

Seventy percent reported that they or their clinic had experienced threats due to providing gender-affirming care. The most common threats experienced by participants were social media posts (44%), followed by phone calls to their clinic (38%). In addition, almost one-quarter reported receiving threatening emails, while 21% had had protestors show up at their clinic. For example, one Behavioral Health Provider from the South said, “[We’ve received] hundreds of harassing or threatening emails and calls to the clinic saying I should be ‘86d’ [killed] and people saying they were going to videotape patients and providers coming in and out of the clinic.” Another Behavioral Health Provider from the West said: “[We’ve experienced] phone calls and voicemails telling the clinic that we are killing children [along with] protesters outside the clinic and billboards placed close to the clinic.”

The qualitative analyses showed that the harassment often contained religious language or misinformation about gender-affirming care. For example, one physician from the Midwest said: “A conservative political candidate tweeted a video of me giving a talk about gender-affirming care and stated me and my health system are experimenting on children. We also received a piece of mail at [the] clinic saying we were disobeying the lord and will be going to hell.”

Several providers noted an escalation of the types of threats they received, often starting with online harassment and progressing into more severe and direct threats.

A person operating in good faith can raise legitimate concerns about medical interventions in the field of gender-affirming care. One year ago, in a New York Times column titled “As Kids, They Thought They Were Trans. They No Longer Do.,” Pamela Paul profiled several people who in their youth underwent medical treatment for gender dysphoria and later, filled with regret, detransitioned. Paul’s piece also presents professionals in the field who have had second thoughts themselves and who are critical of others who, they believe, are insufficiently careful in their advocacy for and delivery of such treatment.

Our civil society thrives when its members engage one another peacefully and honestly, with evidence and arguments. The current representative of House District 39 does not routinely conduct herself in this way. The kind of behavior in which she all too often engages is destructive coming from ordinary people in everyday contexts. That an elected official would target individuals who had given testimony at a legislative hearing is a dangerous and unconscionable low.