The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently released a report linking “gender ideology” to leftwing authoritarianism and political violence – a study scientists say was poorly conducted and “nakedly political”, likely leading to greater politicization of science and health. It follows attempts by the administration to limit access to gender-affirming care – including, on Friday, an agreement reached between the Department of Justice and a New York hospital to no longer offer pediatric gender-affirming care. Dozens of hospitals stopped offering gender-affirming care after the Trump administration began investigating them for offering the standard of care.
Patients on Medicaid and government insurance plans have also been blocked from accessing care, and a proposed rule would block any health system offering gender-affirming care from receiving federal funding. The new report, which was not published by a scientific journal and did not undergo peer review, takes aim at medical organizations offering guidelines on gender-affirming care. It also links those who say they support trans individuals with supporting authoritarianism and political violence.
I think this is probably the most obviously political study that I’ve come across.” The report is “quite an abnormal document with a number of oddities,” said Daniel Aaron, an associate professor at the University of Utah’s SJ Quinney College of Law. The HHS did not respond by press time to the Guardian’s questions about whether this report was commissioned by the agency and if it violated federal regulations. Aaron believes the report would not survive peer review and wondered why a political science report was published by HHS.
Craig Konnoth, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law who coauthored with Aaron a perspective on gender-affirming care policy for the New England Journal of Medicine, agreed. He sees the report as an attempt to undermine mainstream health and science organizations such as the American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, and the American Academy of Pediatrics, all named in the report. Any standard set by any licensing board becomes ‘authoritarian’,” Konnoth said.
He said the researchers are planning to release more information, including the numbers from the survey, and they are planning to submit the study to an unnamed journal for publication. He argued that the guidelines appear to push people toward ideological extremes. The political ideology questionnaire essentially measured whether someone was a Democrat, said Meyerowitz-Katz, who added: “I don’t think anyone would think this is a good measure of authoritarianism.” One of the statements was about whether opposition to gay marriage is homophobic; another was a statement about whether the focus on terrorism should shift to the far right.
For instance, approximately 75-80% of deaths from terrorist attacks in the United States come from people on the far right, and rightwing attacks are more lethal than leftwing violence. Similarly, the questions on political violence focused only on political violence against conservative figures or institutions, he said. If they’d included political violence against other actors, “you would almost certainly see the opposite correlation,” making the questionnaire an unreliable predictor of whether someone supports political violence, Meyerowitz-Katz said.
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