A fourth-year medical student at Wake Forest University in North Carolina posted online that she intentionally stuck a patient with a needle twice during a blood draw after he disparaged her use of specific pronouns.
Kychelle Del Rosario vented about the incident in a now-deleted tweet in which she said, “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.”
The account Libs of Tik Tok saved an image of the tweet and republished it. Wake Forest School of Medicine administrators issued a vague statement via Twitter in response to the incident when it was brought to their attention. While they acknowledged that what Del Rosario did was wrong, they did not detail what kinds of repercussions she will face.
“Thank you for bringing this to our attention. This student’s tweet does not reflect how Wake Forest University School of Medicine treats patients and provides patient care. We are taking measures to address this with the student,” Wake Forest School of Medicine said.
Del Rosario has a history of supporting transgender rights and hoped to dedicate her medical career to caring for the transgender community, according to the Post Millennial, a conservative news outlet based in Canada. She also protested against Republican transgender-related legislation in North Carolina, such as the so-called bathroom bill, which banned people from using restrooms that align with their gender identity rather than their sex assigned at birth. Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper rolled back the law in 2017 but stopped short of a full repeal.
Wake Forest University did not respond to requests for more details about the consequences of Del Rosario’s actions.
Reporting by The Washington Examiner.
