Recently, I have been attempting to document the ongoing legislative attacks against transgender youth in the United States, which include at least 23 bills attacking the right to lifesaving healthcare and at least 53 attempting to ban trans youth from sports.

The common theme in these bills is that they are all literal copycats of each other, as has been pointed out by other advocates and journalists doing this work.

And most of these legislative attacks against trans youth are not coming from public concern: “These bills come from the same forces that drove previous anti-equality fights by pushing copycat bills across state houses — dangerous, anti-LGBTQ organizations like the Heritage Foundation, Alliance Defending Freedom (designated by Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group), and Eagle Forum among others..” Human Rights Campaign reports.

While Republican representatives practice a politics of hate that is copy-pasted to reproduce violence, there also seems to be an army of Twitter bots with a free license to spread misinformation.

One responded to my post on gender-affirming healthcare, claiming that trans youth ‘grow’ out of being themselves, that lifesaving healthcare is ‘abuse’, that the barriers that are putting kids at risk of suicide should be dismissed because other kids “have other big issues.”

Facts from studies and lived experiences show that the opposite is true: A study of 2,500 trans folks found that over a 10-year period, odds of getting mental health treatment decreased by 8 percent for every year since receiving gender-affirming surgery, according to the American Journal of Psychiatry.

More than half of trans children were at risk of suicide this past year, and access to gender-affirming care is linked to being at lower risk of attempting suicide by nearly 40 percent in transgender and nonbinary youth, Trevor Project found.

When I reported the bot’s tweets, Twitter said they don’t violate the platform’s safety policies. Does safety not include fighting misinformation that is putting trans youth’s lives at risk?