How Pfizer Pushed Radical Gender Ideology On American Hospitals

The Healthcare Equality Index, funded by Pfizer and PhRMA, pushed radical gender ideology on American hospitals by awarding points for all the policies Children’s National implemented.

It was 2019 when Beth Rempe, then a nurse at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., first noticed the change.

Doctors were wearing pins sporting the transgender flag. Nurses were asking children, most with no history of gender dysphoria, for their preferred pronouns, which were entered into an electronic record system and documented on white boards outside their rooms. More patients were on puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, especially young girls. And the top-ranked hospital was telling staff that people could change gender based on their “mood,” according to slides from a mandatory training reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

The training, which was offered as recently as January, included a primer on “zi/hir” pronouns and used a “gender unicorn” to illustrate the “spectrum” of “other gender(s).”

By 2022, Rempe said, Children’s National was requiring staffers to use a patient’s preferred pronouns, no questions asked, even as European medical authorities were backing away from that practice, warning that on-demand gender affirmation could entrench dysphoria rather than reduce it, particularly in children. Worried the policy did more harm than good, Rempe asked for an exemption, which the hospital denied. She quit in early 2022.

“I was concerned that I would eventually have to administer puberty blockers and hormones, not just use the pronouns,” Rempe told the Free Beacon. “I kept finding myself in situations I wasn’t comfortable with ethically.”

Since her departure, Rempe has struggled to make sense of what happened to the hospital where she spent 16 years of her professional life. Was there a common thread behind the transgender flag pins, the pronouns, the puberty blockers, and the trainings and policies that enforced the new culture?

As it turns out, there is an outside force pushing hospitals in this direction.

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.

According to a January article by researchers published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), two youths committed suicide in a taxpayer-funded cross-sex hormone study.

Read more