Doxxed Doctors, Library Bomb Threats, and Attacks on Pride Centers: A Week in Escalating Anti-LGBTQ Violence

If you try to follow news on
threats to the LGBTQ community, 2022 has been an exhausting year. It began with
a raft of anti-trans bills considered in state legislatures
before moving to the more recent Republican governors’ tactic of
acting outside the law, alongside harassment and violence
targeting all-ages drag and Pride events and hospitals
that provide gender-affirming care. Each week brings some new twist to the
horror. But the totality of the threats can be lost amid each individual news
story about a conservative flak latching onto the smear “groomer,” or a children’s hospital receiving
bomb threats, or a library being evacuated, or a far-right
group gearing up to attack a Pride celebration.
Each story gets brief attention, then fades into the background as the next
threat emerges. The connections between the individuals and groups driving these threats too often go
unmentioned, and someone casually following the news can easily miss how
widespread and common the increasingly dehumanizing rhetoric, political repression,
and threats of violence have become.

To offer a glimpse of the full
scale of what is occurring, I examined just one week of threats to freedom in
America, from September 19 to September 25, 2022. There
was nothing particularly exceptional about this week, which is what makes it so
troubling—that every week we are exposed to more threats, more dehumanization: an ongoing accumulation.

Last week, Carlson repeatedly defended
the Twitter account Libs of TikTok, which, along with right-wing pundit Matt
Walsh, spent this week cherry-picking informational content about
gender-affirming care from hospital websites. This built a
self-perpetuating news cycle that seemingly crested with victory laps,
when, after the harassment that followed, the hospitals removed the content,
perhaps in hopes the harassment would end, achieving Carlson, Libs of TikTok, and Walsh’s goal of making this
care less accessible.

In one segment, as if both to reassure and inflame those watching, Carlson said, “No parent should put up with
this for one second, no matter what the law says. Your moral duty is to defend
your children. This is an attack on your children, and you should fight back.” Four
days earlier, a Massachusetts woman was charged with calling a bomb threat in to Boston
Children’s Hospital, accusing the staff of being “sickos,” after which the hospital
was locked down but no bomb was found. The response from Carlson and Libs of
TikTok and Walsh wasn’t to back off but to keep picking off more hospitals, pushing harder on
Republicans to join their “early-stage pogrom.” Because Carlson is just the
weeknight guy. The weekends are for street harassment, when right-wing
influencers and neo-Nazis alike take the fight to those they’ve been told are
after children and are therefore acceptable targets, and to “fight back.”

September
19

American
Principles Project releases an ad in Arizona claiming President
Joe Biden and Mark Kelly, the Arizona Democratic candidate for Senate, are
“taking away parental rights.” The ad features censored, partially nude photos
of apparently trans children, including an image from a video from Boston
Children’s Hospital. The anti-Kelly ad closes, “We have to go out there and
stop this.”

On
Twitter, Libs of TikTok takes credit for getting Akron Children’s
Hospital to remove gender-affirming care information, after making several
misleading posts about the hospital’s procedures a few days earlier. The hospital said in a statement that it had faced
a flood of  “harassment, intimidation and
the intentional spread of misinformation,” which started after Libs of TikTok
posts.

Tucker
Carlson, with a chyron beneath him reading “These Are Sex Crimes and People
Should Be Punished,” said: “Some people describe what is
happening as ‘grooming.’ We’re not exactly sure what that means, but if it’s
sexually abusing children, yeah, that is what’s happening.” (That is not at all
what is happening.)

September
20

News
reports appear after antisemitic flyers claiming “Every Single Aspect of Disney
Child Grooming Is Jewish” are left in the driveways of some residents of
Lynchburg, Virginia, including the former mayor, who is Jewish. The flyers were in plastic bags, weighted
down with corn; they featured the names and photos of several individuals and
the repeated phrase “Protect Your Children.” (Nearly identical flyers had
previously been left outside homes in Nashville, Tennessee, in August and in Miami and Coral Gables, Florida, and the Los Angeles neighborhood Westwood in June.)

Public
school students in East Baton Rouge, told they were going to a “college and
career fair,” were in reality brought to a Christian event, the Baton Rouge
Advocate reported, where students were divided by
gender, with girls having to listen to talk about rape and “forgiving the
offender,” according to one teacher present, while the boys were told to
compete for money for doing the most push-ups. A trans boy assigned to the
girls’ talk was at first told he could not leave, and other trans students
throughout the day reported being bullied, with some having water poured on
their heads. Students said they felt duped and are working to hold
the church legally accountable.

Seventeen
public library branches in Fort Worth, Texas, close and evacuate after a bomb threat,
later determined to be unfounded.

Right-wing
pundit Matt Walsh claims on Twitter to be “investigating”
the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt University for offering
gender-affirming care, singling out doctors by name. (In June, Walsh
released an anti-trans documentary called What Is a Woman? The Daily
Wire, where he works, reportedly spent millions to promote it on Facebook.)

Tennessee
Republican Governor Bill Lee calls for an investigation into
Vanderbilt’s pediatric gender-affirming care clinic, telling the Daily Wire, “We should not allow
permanent, life-altering decisions that hurt children or policies that suppress
religious liberties, all for the purpose of financial gain.”

Georgia Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene holds a press conference in Washington to promote her proposed federal legislation to criminalize providing gender-affirming care to minors. In addition, it would bar federal funding to all gender-affirming care at any age, as well as barring federal funding for insurance plans that cover gender-affirming care. “How on earth can this be happening in America? It’s hard to even understand,” she said.

Tucker
Carlson runs a segment in defense of Gays Against Groomers, an account in the
vein of Libs of TikTok, with Jaimee Michell, who runs GAG. He claims that GAG’s PayPal and Venmo
accounts were shut down as punishment because they think it is “wrong that
adults enlist children in their sexual fantasies.” (Previously Michell compared gender-affirming surgery to the medical experiments of Nazi doctor Josef
Mengele.)

September
21

After
a bomb threat, the Denver Public Library closes its branches and cancels
Bookmobile stops. KUSA reports, “The Denver Police Department
said … that preliminary findings indicate the threat was sent from out of state
and that a number of similar threats were sent to libraries in other states.”

Vanderbilt
University Medical Center releases a statement saying it is “now
the subject of social media posts and a video that misrepresent facts about the
care the Medical Center provides to transgender patients.” It also removed the clinic’s page from its website.

Tennessee
Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn joins Governor Lee’s call to investigate
VUMC, saying she was “shocked” by the videos and that “there is nothing healthy about mutilating the bodies of minor
children.” (The night before, she attended a black-tie event where she was photographed with Walsh and said, “Stay tuned
for more tomorrow about how puberty blockers are being used on children.”)

Tucker
Carlson runs another segment spreading lies
about gender-affirming care, singling out VUMC, claiming “Vanderbilt Ghouls
Castrate Kids for Big Profit.” He runs names and photos of the hospital board
of directors, taking time to read each name, adding, “Let’s hope these people
act immediately to stop this crime.”

September
22

Nashville
Public Libraries close all 21 branches after a bomb
threat, which police later said was not credible. A city councilwoman told WTVF, “This is so common now, this
is domestic terrorism. This is trying to make us all afraid, and a library is
really the perfect target for this kind of stuff because it is a place of knowledge
and information and history.” It’s not clear from what police have shared why
the libraries are being targeted, but now many are across the country.

Blackburn
asks the Food and Drug Administration
to investigate the use of puberty blockers. Walsh celebrates the news on his podcast, while
also claiming that “the left” is threatening to have him “arrested and even
killed.”

The
Tennessee chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union condemns the calls for investigations,
adding, “Misinformation like the recent social media posts has fueled attacks on
trans children and adults from state legislatures across the country.” (On
Wednesday, Matt Walsh said he had met with Tennessee
lawmakers working on a new bill to “shut down” the gender-affirming care clinic
at VUMC.)

The
state of Florida argues that the educators and students challenging the “STOP WOKE Act”—a law restricting
how race, gender, and sexuality are discussed at school and in the workplace—have
no First Amendment protections from government regulation of speech, because in
regulating curricula at public universities the government is regulating its own speech. This is just one of three challenges to the law; a judge
had already partially blocked enforcement of the law and called it
unconstitutional.

September
23

In
Florida, a judge denies Governor Ron DeSantis’s request to
dismiss a lawsuit brought by the state attorney who refused to criminalize abortion and gender-affirming
care, which DeSantis called the prosecutor’s “woke agenda.” It
will go to trial.

An
Arizona judge allows a provision of an 1864 law, adopted when Arizona was not yet a state,
to go into effect, criminalizing abortion nearly completely. Republican
Attorney General Mark Brnovich, who recently lost his bid for U.S. senator, asked
the court to reinstate the law after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v.
Wade in June.

At
2:20 p.m., Libs of TikTok posts about a gender-affirming program
at U.W. Health, a University of Wisconsin hospital, singling out one specific
woman doctor over multiple posts. At 3:09 p.m., Ted Cruz shares one of the posts, commenting, “She
does this to children. Sterilizes & mutilates them.” At 4:45 p.m., the
account announces the program’s website has been
“scrubbed.”

Later,
Libs of TikTok posts about an adolescent clinic at
Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital, specifically its practice of asking a
parent to step out of the room for a few minutes to give young people “safe
space.” The video posted features one specific woman doctor. 

September
24

Community
members learn that the Pride Community Center in Gainesville, Florida, had its glass windows and door shattered. This was “retaliation,” according to a local pastor who
volunteered at the center, for what was meant to be “a student meet-up for
queer and questioning kids to come together and just be.” A note left with the rocks used to smash
the windows appears to back this up. The center noted that this was just a few weeks
ahead of its Pride festival, which hadn’t been held since 2019.

Anti-“grooming”
protesters picket outside a drag event at UpRising Bakery in Lake in the Hills,
Illinois, met by supporters of the bakery and the LGBTQ community who intended to
protect the bakery. The protesters have been coming to the bakery for weeks, with Trump flags and one man pledging
to stay all winter. After the weekend protests, the bakery has been a
discussion item on one of the remaining QAnon message boards, with one user
writing, “They don’t want this story on Q boards, because they know we will
pick it apart.” (The bakery was vandalized in July, after announcing an
earlier drag event and receiving threats. The windows were smashed and walls
spray-painted with the messages, “Christ is king” and “Fags rape
kids.”)

Protect
Texas Kids, headed by self-described “Christian fascist” Kelly Neidert, and other far-right groups gather
outside First Christian Church in Katy, Texas, near Houston, attempting to intimidate
people attending a drag bingo fundraiser hosted by the church. Steve Bannon’s
War Room had promoted the protest, with guest and Representative Lauren
Boebert’s former campaign manager, Sherronna Bishop, calling it a “spiritual battle” meant to
stop parents from supporting their trans kids. (Bishop’s home was one of those
raided by the FBI as part of an election-related investigation.) The neo-Nazi
group Aryan Freedom Network and the Proud Boys were present. Some protesters carried swastika flags and antisemitic and homophobic
signs.

September
25

The
“patriot pastor” Sean Feucht brings his revivalesque anti-mask
“superspreader” road show,
“Let Us Worship,” to Times Square, protested by NYC for Abortion. Feucht gained
prominence in MAGA circles by claiming churches were being victimized by
Covid-19 health restrictions and then “pivoted seamlessly to raging against
the alleged ‘groomers’ at Disneyland,” as Rolling Stone reported, organizing protests there in April after Ron
DeSantis made Disney an enemy over his “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

The
Miami-Herald editorial board warns of DeSantis’s “Christian
nationalist schtick” and its links to white supremacy. “If DeSantis is telling
his followers to go fight to shape the nation to their religious liking,” it writes, “the counter-narrative should be that this rhetoric could not only
incite violence, but it also undermines Christianity itself.”

The
president of the Heritage Foundation, a key group pushing anti-LGBTQ laws
across the United States, celebrates the apparent (and now official) victory of Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s new prime minister, a fascist.