Of the various hospitals around the country that have been facing public outcries over their decisions to conduct genital mutilation surgeries on children along with other “gender-affirming care,” Boston Children’s Hospital is among the largest and the most well-known. They have since pulled all of their promotional material off of their website after it attracted media attention, but the “services” are still continuing. In addition to peaceful, lawful protests, the hospital has also been hit with a series of bomb threats and other threats of violence. This week, the Associated Press published a glowing review of the hospital’s transgender programs, along with a series of interviews with some of the doctors there, describing how they are “coping” with all of the public outrage.

On a Wednesday morning last month, Boston Police swept into Boston Children’s Hospital to investigate the fourth bomb threat at the institution in just four months. They evacuated a building and cordoned off the area, blocking staff from reaching offices and operating rooms. About an hour later, BPD gave the all clear, and life inside the sprawling campus on Longwood Avenue resumed.

Until the next day, that is, when yet another bomb threat was received.

Since August, Boston Children’s Hospital, widely considered the top pediatric hospital in the country, has been the target of a barrage of hate mail, death threats, and vitriolic and antisemitic messages. Many appeared to have been spurred by an anti-LGBTQ+ Twitter account that attacked the hospital for providing care to transgender children and teens.

To be clear, bomb threats and death threats are never acceptable, no matter how outrageous any people or institutions are acting. The people doing these things deserve to be prosecuted and punished.

With that said, I still find it amazing that the AP would publish an article of this length without even once questioning what this hospital (and too many others) are doing to children. They dishonestly blame all of the threatened violence on “anti-LGBTQ+” activists. In reality, this topic has nothing to do with gay and lesbian people. In fact, a growing number of gays have been speaking out against these “medical” practices and expressing their outrage at having such things associated with them in the media. (See Gays Against Groomers for just one example.)

Right in the middle of the article, the AP explains how the hospital’s “Gender Multispecialty Service” treats patients from the ages of 3 to 25. That statistic is simply dropped in the middle of the piece without so much as a comment about it. Three-year-olds are being treated for gender dysphoria? The article didn’t attempt to obtain so much as a single quote from anyone who would look at that sentence and have the common sense to be completely appalled.

Fortunately, some officials at the state level have finally been moved to act and bring this situation back to something approaching sanity. Florida already banned such “treatments” for children. And now, Oklahoma is looking at banning trans surgery for anyone under 21.

A Republican legislator in Oklahoma has moved to ban gender transition procedures from being provided to anyone under the age of 21.

The bill seeks to ban medical professionals from providing or referring controversial procedures like puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and sex-change surgeries for those under 21. The legislation would also block such procedures or services on the young from being tied to public funding, and any organization or hospital found in violation would lose such funding.

Personally, I think the Oklahoma legislation goes too far, though I can appreciate the sentiment. The recognized age of adulthood (for most things, anyway) is 18 in the United States. As I’ve said from the beginning of this gruesome debate, if adults want to pay to have their bodies mutilated and can find a doctor willing to do it, that’s up to them. (Assuming they are willing to take responsibility for the consequences of their decisions when they later realize what a horrendous mistake they’ve made.) The focus of this debate should remain on the safety of children, along with the prevention of the destruction of women’s and girls’ sports.

In the longer term, we could seriously use a public debate on the almost total lack of regulation of the medical industry in America except in the most severe cases. Doctors regularly engage in issuing what are known as “off-label “drug prescriptions. These are prescriptions doctors write when authorizing medications for a purpose other than what the FDA approved the drug for. And the FDA doesn’t seem to lift a finger to do anything about it. These include the highly dangerous puberty blockers that are being given to children at places like Boston Children’s Hospital. (Where they still have the nerve to brandish a logo reading, “Until every child is well.”)

Those drugs, including Lupron, Eligard, and others, were never approved by the FDA for use in pediatric gender dysphoria cases. They are cancer drugs and they are only issued to cancer patients with great care and supervision because of the widely known, dangerous side effects that go along with them. And yet we have pediatricians handing them out like candy to cancer-free, gender-confused children, sometimes for years on end. And nobody in the government is saying a word to stop them. This can’t be allowed to continue.