Wake Forest University fourth-year medical student and transgender activist Kychelle Del Rosario was trying to draw blood from a patient when the patient objected to the Del Rosario’s support of transgender ideology by wearing a pin with her “preferred pronouns” on it. And what did Del Rosario do next? In a tweet on March 29, 2022, that has since been deleted, she stated:
“I had a patient I was doing a blood draw on see my pronoun pin and loudly laugh to the staff ‘She/Her? Well of course it is! What other pronouns even are there? It? I missed his vein so he had to get stuck twice.”
A logical interpretation of the tweet is that Del Rosario intentionally missed the patient’s vein in order to “punish” him for criticizing her transactivism. When Del Rosario’s tweet surfaced on social media and Wake Forest began to investigate her conduct, she immediately deleted the tweet and began to backtrack on her story. As reported by the Gold and Black, the Wake Forest School Newspaper, in a statement to the university Del Rosario wrote:
“I am writing this as an apology for a very irresponsible tweet that I sent on Twitter that I highly regret. For the event mentioned in the tweet, I was performing a blood draw on a patient and during our conversation they had shown dismay at my pronoun pin, I calmly shared my thoughts about pronouns and did not escalate the situation further. When I was doing the blood draw, I missed the first time due to my inexperience as a student, and per our policy, my supervisor performed the successful blood draw the second time. During this encounter, I never intended to harm the patient…I am truly sorry for poorly representing our school and our health system. I will reflect on responsible social media use as a professional and my duty to care for all my patients, regardless of any differences of belief.”
How did the Wake Forest School newspaper respond to the incident? In an opinion piece in the Gold and Black, Opinion Editor Sophie Guymon said the real issue in the matter was not the apparent harm caused by Del Rosario but rather the alleged bigotry of the patient who objected to transgender ideology. Guymon wrote:
“The crux of the issue at hand is not the conduct of Del Rosario, but the bigotry expressed by her patient…Respecting and validating someone’s pronouns and gender identity should not be a matter of political belief or ideology, but one of simple human decency. Everyone has pronouns, regardless of whether or not their gender identity aligns with their biological sex. When cisgender people display their pronouns on social media or wear pronoun pins, it helps foster a safe and accepting space for their trans peers. These acts of solidarity with the LGBTQ+ community should not be mocked — when people shrug off this mockery as a lighthearted joke, they are enforcing cis-normativity and transphobia, encouraging discrimination not just in healthcare, but in other spaces as well… It is appalling that the vast majority of the media coverage surrounding Del Rosario’s tweet is critiquing her lack of professionalism rather than her patient’s display of bigotry.”
It appears that Guymon actually believes that if a patient objects to any part of the LGBT agenda, it is not a big deal if a medical professional deliberately harms the patient in retaliation. Indeed, she believes that objecting to any iota of this radical agenda is more harmful than deliberately injuring a patient. If this is the philosophy of Wake Forest Medical School, I sure would not want to be a patient at any medical facility it has ties to.
While Wake Forest ultimately found that Del Rosario’s tweet did not reflect reality and that she did not in fact harm a patient, the medical school still placed her on a brief leave of absence for “an inappropriate and misleading post.” But the facts still remain. A medical student at Wake Forest believed that it was totally appropriate to allege that she harmed a patient who objected to her transgender pronoun pin. And the opinion editor of her school newspaper attacked the press for focusing on the alleged injury, rather than the alleged “bigotry,” of the patient. All I can say is that I hope none of us end up anywhere near Wake Forest University. Just dare to criticize the LGBT agenda and almost any physical harm could be justified against you.
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