If you’re one of the many, many, many people who have looked around in the last several years and felt a little baffled by just how exactly the transgender craze took off so quickly and embedded itself so deeply into western culture, take heart: those answers are starting to come. Which is a good thing with regard to knowing how to protect your children from being convinced by agenda-driven adults they weren’t actually born in the wrong body.

Unfortunately, those answers are coming with some pretty terrible news.

First, the answers:

The Washington Free Beacon is reporting the Human Rights Campaign — last suspected of being the wind beneath the wings of Bud Light’s rather disastrous decision to make Dylan Mulvaney the voice of women for Bud Light — is behind the lightning-fast pervasiveness of trans imagery and ideology in the health care space.

The Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index became a flashpoint last month when commentators posited that the scorecard was behind Bud Light’s decision to air an advertisement featuring the transgender TikTok personality Dylan Mulvaney. Well, it has a sibling.

Meet the Healthcare Equality Index, the Human Rights Campaign’s scorecard for hospitals that purports to measure the “equity and inclusion of their LGBTQ+ patients.” The index, which uses a 100 point scale, is funded by Pfizer and PhRMA, the trade association that lobbies on behalf of large pharmaceutical companies. And, Rempe noticed, it awards points for all of the policies Children’s National implemented.

To earn a perfect score, hospitals must display LGBT symbols, solicit and use patients’ preferred pronouns, and conduct trainings on LGBT issues approved by the Human Rights Campaign, according to the scoring criteria. They must also provide the same treatments for gender dysphoria that they provide for other medical conditions—meaning a hospital that uses puberty blockers to treat precocious puberty cannot withhold the drugs from children who say they’re transgender. And though the index does not mention medical conscience exemptions explicitly, it does penalize hospitals for allowing “discriminatory treatment that is in conflict with their non-discrimination policy.”

The Human Rights Campaign has some interesting associations, detailed here at Influence Watch.

HRC’s charitable arm, the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, which is freer under tax law to receive contributions from charitable nonprofits and foundations like the Silicon Valley Community Foundation,¹⁹ the Soros Fund Charitable Foundation,²⁰ and the Planned Parenthood Federation of America,²¹ provides substantial transfers to the main HRC lobbying arm.

Is it becoming reasonable to ask yet, why, if these progressive ideas about equity and inclusion are so very good for society, society must be blackmailed to adopt them? And lest anyone think that “society” is the rube in this equation that must be convinced by the much smarter and sophisticated progressive elites to mend their hick ways, I give you the accompanying terrible news:

Fifteen Republicans in the U.S. House and Senate sent a letter to the National Institutes of Health Tuesday, demanding answers about a study on experimental medical interventions for youth who claim to identify as transgender.

Two of the study participants committed suicide, 11 experienced suicidal ideation, and the drugs participants took will likely sterilize them, the Republicans noted.

“It is sickening that the federal government is preying on young people and using our taxpayer dollars to advance its radical gender ideology,” Rep. Josh Brecheen, R-Okla., told The Daily Signal in a statement on the letter, exclusively provided to The Daily Signal. “We are rightfully demanding answers from NIH and we are committed to holding those responsible accountable for this tragic loss of life.”

The National Institutes of Health granted $477,444 in a five-year grant to the Boston Children’s Hospital, the University of California at San Francisco, and the Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago for the study, “Psychosocial Functioning in Transgender Youth after 2 Years of Hormones.” Dr. Diane Chen at the Lurie Children’s Hospital led the study, which the New England Journal of Medicine published in January.

I wrote about this last August.

When Elon Musk recently requested the GOP should stay out of people’s bedrooms, he glossed over a very real phenomenon he apparently thinks only happens with the support of one side of the political aisle.  But if he’s truly interested in getting the government out of people’s bedrooms, he’ll have to broaden his condemnation. Because Democrats and progressives are very much in people’s bedrooms. So much so, in fact, that an argument could be made that part of why the transgender debate seems to be everywhere now is because the left has funded it to ensure it’s relentlessly culturally pervasive.

Look no further than Boston Children’s Hospital, which has become the face of the transgender youth movement, and not in a good way. It’s no mystery why people are horrified by what’s been going on in these hallowed, Harvard-adjacent halls. A look at some of their videos selling “gender affirming” surgery makes the hairs on the back of the neck stand up, especially when considering the mutilation involved in using forearm flesh to create fake phalluses for young girls.

It looks like Congress and The Daily Signal did the legwork, and thank God for them both. While demanding answers is certainly a shift in the right direction, the damage already done to the children in this study, and to the countless others who will only determine much later their very bodies were used to score political wins, should keep the good people still looking around, wondering what happened, vigilant in their questioning.

If we’re to survive the appropriation of the gender dysphoric to be used as a political cudgel, we’re going to need a lot more letters, demand for answers, and acceptance of the horrors already done.