MUSC gave in to bad actors when it stopped treatments for trans teens | Opinion
As a South Carolina native, the Medical University of South Carolina has always stood out as a world-class institution, the best the country has to offer.
My mother spent much of her final months of life, in a semi-vegetative state, receiving great care at MUSC. Other family members and loved ones have been served well there as well. That’s why it was so heartbreaking to learn that MUSC gave into bad actors when their most vulnerable patients needed them to be steadfast.
Hospital officials cowered in the face of political pressure, robbing transgender youth of life-saving care, according to an extensive investigative report by ProPublica and The (Charleston) Post & Courier. They were cowed by a tweet from an erratic, bigoted billionaire, Elon Musk, who knows nothing about South Carolina, and state lawmakers comfortable lying about how MUSC was handling the care of trans youth.
After receiving phone calls from powerful people in the state, MUSC officials began shutting doctors out of the decision-making process, according to the ProPublica report. They stopped publicly supporting the LGBTQ+ community. They pulled back on providing hormones for gender transition for young people up to 17 years old, a move more extreme than the demands coming from conservatives in the South Carolina General Assembly.
Patients showed up at the hospital not realizing they were no longer eligible for the care they had been receiving for several months or longer.
“I can’t watch myself go back in time like that,” a 17-year-old who had previously attempted suicide and was cut off from testosterone after being on it for more than a year, told ProPublica. “I was like, ‘I don’t think I’m gonna survive this.’”
It’s a black mark MUSC won’t easily live down.
Those families are unlikely to trust them again. The respect I had for that institution, despite its great medical personnel, has been greatly diminished. What good is a place of healing if it can’t stand firm when some of the most vulnerable, neediest people in the country need them most?
Rep. Nancy Mace of the First District attacked political opponent Annie Andrews with a misleading video suggesting MUSC was performing sex-change surgeries on children. Andrews is a pediatrician at MUSC not even connected to the endocrinology clinic. It was akin to what conservative activists did when they falsely claimed three N.C. hospitals were transitioning toddlers.
“I went after the Medical Center of South Carolina with 19 other of my door-kicking, rock-ribbed, and South Carolina’s most Conservative legislator friends,” Republican state Rep. Thomas Beach wrote in a Facebook post, ProPublica reported. “It feels good to be a gangster.”
Gangster is the right word, because Beach and others like him are gangsters. Because gangsters kill — and robbing trans youth of necessary care can feel like a death sentence. Because gangsters intimidate, which is what lawmakers like Beach and Mace have done to children and teens already susceptible to ungodly-high rates of suicide. Because gangsters are only concerned about their own power and glorification, not the health and well-being of the least of these.
The years-long attack on the transgender community is well-known. Politicians, mostly conservative and Republican, use them as political fodder, turn trans people into bogeymen, to gin up votes. It’s not subtle. And the attacks are growing as Republicans in the S.C. General Assembly gear up to pass more bans on trans youth care the way several other red states have.
It’s disgusting, particularly coming from men and women who feign a belief in parents’ rights, though only for parents who are ideologically aligned with those lawmakers.
But they are craven politicians. I don’t expect much more from them.
I expected more from MUSC. I no longer do, and probably never will again. It now looks like just another high-profile institution run by cowards unworthy of the positions and power bestowed upon them.
Issac Bailey is a Carolinas opinion writer for McClatchy.
