Today, Representative Dan Bishop (R., N.C.), along with Republican colleagues Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Paul Gosar, Mary Miller, Andy Biggs, Chip Roy, and Jody Hice, sent a letter to Centers for Disease Control (CDC) director Rochelle Walensky slamming the agency’s “unconscionable” promotion of a website that encourages children to question their gender identity outside the purview of parental oversight, and demanding that the CDC remove the page “as a suggested resource and provide us with information, documents, and communications related to the decision to include this website as a suggested resource in the first place.”
Earlier this month, Breitbart reported that the CDC was “promoting to youth an online chat space that discusses sex, polyamorous relationships, the occult, sex change operations, and activism, and is specifically designed to be quickly hidden while being used.” The forum, called “Q Chat,” is still featured on the CDC website’s LGBT Health Youth Resources page and “features conversations on ‘Gender Affirmation Surgeries,’ as well as on hormone replacement therapy,” Breitbart reported. “The chats are used in part to tell children ‘where you can find resources’ related to their transition.”
Q Chat, which describes itself as a forum of “online discussion groups for LGBTQ+ and questioning teens ages 13 to 19,” hosts “live and chat based . . . conversations” between young children and LGBT activists “who work at LGBTQ+ centers around the United States.” Those conversations include any number of highly sexualized topics, including “Drag Culture 101” and “Having Multiple Genders,” interspersed with normal child-oriented content such as video games and Pokémon.
More concerning still, the site appears to have a number of built-in features designed to allow children to conceal its content from parents and family members: “Each section of the website has a large button on the bottom of the screen that says ‘Click/Tap here for a quick escape . . .’ and shows a stick figure running towards an exit,” Breitbart wrote. “When clicked, the button takes users to the Google homepage, hiding the site.” On top of that, the site offers users “discreet” text reminders that “do not include ‘Q Chat Space’ or the name of the chat,” designed to “keep confidentiality — what’s shared here, stays here.”
An academic article published by the National Library of Medicine “praised the service for its ability to be hidden from parents, saying that ‘The platform’s chat-based nature likely helps youth avoid concerns about family members accidentally overhearing their conversations,’” Breitbart reported.
In the letter to Walensky, Bishop and the others noted that “the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is the national public health agency of the United States and exists to secure the health and safety of the American people. Directing children to access online chatrooms that discuss sex, polyamorous relationships, white privilege, gender reassignment surgeries and LGBT activism is not among its many functions.” Furthermore, they wrote, the efforts to conceal the website’s content “from parents and family members” are “deeply concerning,” and the “interspersion” of “more innocuous topics that may appeal to children, including Q Chats regarding Pokémon, Star Wars, music, and pets . . . with conversations of a mature nature is cause for greater concern, not less. Despite Q Chat’s desire for confidentiality, it is important that Congress conduct oversight to protect children from a bureaucracy that is either unwilling to do so or views itself as instrumental in their ongoing corruption.”