As President Donald Trump and his administration continue their systematic attack on trans Americans, both activists and unaffiliated individuals are targeting the FBI’s latest attempt to prosecute doctors giving trans youth gender-affirming care. On Monday, the FBI asked for tips on doctors or hospitals “who mutilate under the guise of gender-affirming care,” which refers to surgical intervention for trans youth. But the “criminals” the Trump administration is hunting may not even exist — every major American health organization is firm that surgical intervention does not happen for children under 12, and is incredibly rare for minors between 15 and 17. Since this tip line seems most likely to target providers and programs helping trans youth with non-invasive therapies — even as the Trump administration threatens to remove funding — people are onrushing the line with incredibly demeaning and foul-mouthed comments, according to two sources familiar with the matter and a recording shared with Rolling Stone.
The Trump administration’s return to the White House has been marked by the dogged targeting of transgender youth and their health care. In January, Trump issued an executive order calling gender affirming care the “chemical and surgical mutilation” of children and threatening to remove federal funding from hospitals that performed it. In April, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi — who served as one of the lawyers on President Trump’s first impeachment defense team — issued a memo stating the Justice Department’s intention to use several existing U.S. laws to investigate providers of trans health care, including those prohibiting female genital mutilation. So on June 2, the FBI asked anyone who had tips of doctors or practitioners performing gender affirming “surgical procedures” to report them directly to the FBI tip line. (It doesn’t feel coincidental that this request was sent on the second day of Pride month, typically a celebration of the LGBTQ+ community.)
“Help the FBI protect children,” the Trump FBI — fronted by the president’s uber-loyalists Kash Patel and Dan Bongino — posted to X on Monday. “As the Attorney General has made clear, we will protect our children and hold accountable those who mutilate them under the guise of gender-affirming care. Report tips of any hospitals, clinics, or practitioners performing these surgical procedures on children at 1-800-CALL-FBI or tips.fbi.gov.”
These assessments of trans healthcare as “mutilation” go directly against the opinions of every major medical body in the U.S. — including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Medical Association, and the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. According to reports from both the National Institute of Health and Harvard’s School of Public Health, researchers could not find any evidence of children under 12 receiving any kind of surgical intervention. For minors 15 to 17 years old, almost all who underwent surgery had procedures focused on their chests — but at a lower rate than cisgender males. But in May, a 400-page report released by the Department of Health and Human Services recommended treatment plans entirely similar to conversion therapy.
So it didn’t take long for this social-media post and the accompanying contact information to make its way into the group chats of numerous pro-LGBTQ allies and advocates.
The two sources say that various concerned citizens, activists, and other individuals immediately began making calls — including anonymous VoIP ones — to the 800 number, delivering profane tirades and insults. At times, pissed-off callers were frustrated they couldn’t seem to leave a voicemail and were left chastising what appeared to be just a human operator for the bureau.
One caller tells this magazine that they called the hotline so that they could recommend that the second Trump administration “eat my entire asshole.”
An audio file shared with Rolling Stone featured a gay former federal employee, who requested anonymity, simply screaming into the federal tip line: “Fuck off, Nazi dickheads!”
The other source familiar with the matter says that “more than a dozen” of their friends and advocates they know in pro-LGBTQ political circles were actively crashing the FBI tip line with angry remarks or notes of protest denouncing the administration’s targeting of trans Americans and demonization of trans health care.
However cathartic any spamming of the FBI hotline may be for any number of trans rights supporters, some activists and legal experts warn that callers or pranksters should be incredibly careful about what they say on a recorded federal tip line — especially given the uniquely lawless administration that has shown an eager willingness to crack down on Trump’s enemies when there’s no evidence of any wrongdoing.
“There are absolutely a lot of people who want to clog up the snitch line,” this person says. “My advice is: Don’t make anything that can be construed as a threat. Just speak your mind, be short and sweet about it, hang up.”
The FBI did not provide comment on this story.
This isn’t the first time this new Trump administration has been subjected to heavy bombardments of mean spam. In late February, top Trump adviser Elon Musk demanded that federal employees reply to “an email requesting to understand what they got done last week,” or face a forced “resignation.” As Rolling Stone reported at the time, after copies of the email were leaked online, the government inbox was predictably flooded with pranks and what one Trump administration official described as “very rude” and foul-mouthed emails.
As journalist Jael Holzman, who has covered the Republican Party’s vigorous crackdown on trans people for this magazine, has warned, efforts to launch investigations of the parents of trans kids were incubated at the state level. In recent years, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton emerged as a high-profile proponent of wielding state power against these families. More recently, some of Paxton’s team have filtered into the new Trump administration.
“These decades of established research standards of care that have been empirically validated are now relegated to junk science, and the legitimate science is whatever they want to make up — but that’s the Trump administration for you,” Douglas C. Haldeman, PhD, a clinical psychologist who’s worked with people recovering from conversion therapy, told Rolling Stone in May.
Of course, the attempts to clutter up the feds’ anti-trans tip line will not stop the Trump administration’s multi-pronged onslaught on trans Americans, healthcare providers, and others. But it’s not nothing. Raquel Willis, co-founder of the Gender Liberation Movement, tells Rolling Stone that building a practice of defiance is an important part of making sure communities don’t become complacent to Trump-era harassment attempts — especially those that seem to be attempts at control couched in safety language.
“Even though this FBI tip line and the discourse around it seem maybe innocuous to a lot of people, it does speak to the desire to criminalize bodily autonomy for young trans people and also criminalize private decisions that they’re making with their parents and qualified physicians about their care,” Willis says. “It’s very interesting that conservatives have taken on this crusade to infringe on private decisions when for so long they claimed they didn’t want state intervention in everyday life. This is not actually about some deeper desire to protect anyone. It’s just a desire to control people.”
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