by Megan Brock and Laurel Duggan
The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), which operates a gender clinic, removed numerous videos and posts discussing childhood gender transitions, including irreversible surgeries, from its website amid public backlash, the Daily Caller News Foundation has learned.
The CHOP Gender and Sexuality Development Program came under scrutiny in September 2022 after some of its training videos on childhood gender transitions were circulated online, and the clinic said it was tightening its security that October due to threats. Resources including videos in which clinic staff promoted cross-sex medical interventions for minors and advised school workers to keep children’s gender identity secret from their families have since disappeared from CHOP’s website; these pages are saved in online archives, but their links either redirect to error pages or go to pages that have been heavily altered with certain links removed.
A CHOP webpage linking to a document that promoted “gender-affirming care” for youth, including mastectomies for girls as young as 13, was saved to online archives in June 2022, but that page had been removed from public view by November. The document was produced by CHOP’s PolicyLab, which conducts research and makes public policy recommendations on health care issues.
“Many transmasculine youth … experience chest dysphoria, which is physical and emotional distress caused by the presence of unwanted breast tissue,” the document read. “In research conducted with colleagues at CHOP, we examined the experience of chest dysphoria and top (masculinizing chest) surgery in transmasculine youth ages 13–21 … Top surgery can vastly improve the lives of transmasculine youth and is critical to their health and well-being.”
The CHOP website also removed the public’s ability to download annual reports on the clinic’s achievements in medicine, outreach and advocacy, which were publicly available as of June 2022 but needed to be requested by email as of January 2023, according to online archives. One such report previously obtained by the DCNF revealed that the clinic had hired a social worker to help minors access “gender-affirming” surgeries by gathering letters of support and requesting that insurance companies cover the procedure.
CHOP’s “Professional Resources for the Gender and Sexuality Development Clinic” web page featured an LGBTQ Education Program section and a video resources section as of September 2021, according to online archives, but neither exist on the current website. An hour-long webinar on adolescent medical transition that advised puberty blockers as young as eight and hormones and surgeries as young as 14 was among the links scrubbed from the page, along with videos titled “Supporting Transgender and Gender Expansive Students” and “Discussing Sexuality and Safer Sex with Trans Clients;” the videos are all currently unlisted on YouTube.
A family support and education specialist for CHOP urged school counselors to keep students’ preferred names and pronouns secret from their families and other school staff in the now-removed video on supporting trans students. The same webinar said school bathrooms, locker rooms and sports should be organized based on gender identity rather than biological sex.
CHOP’s Gender and Sexuality Development Program was one of several child gender clinics to come under fire in late 2022 as online activists publicized videos and documents detailing cross-sex medical treatments being offered to children.
Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago came under scrutiny for promoting a “LGBTQ sex shop for teens” that sold sex toys including dildos, vibrators, harnesses and anal toys in its “Beyond the Binary” lessons for local schools, and Boston Children’s Hospital received a bomb threat after unearthed documents and videos revealed the hospital had performed dozens of “gender affirming” mastectomies on children.
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Megan Brock and Laurel Duggan are reporters at Daily Caller News Foundation.
Photo “Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia” by Jeffrey M. Vinocur. CC BY-SA 3.0.
