On September 30, 2026, NPR reported on an unreviewed U.S. Department of Health and Human Services report linking support for gender-affirming care to political violence. The report’s data and funding weren’t public at the time. The people it casts as a danger are transgender patients, while researchers and other experts say its methods, context and authors’ political intentions deserve scrutiny.
An HHS health official, speaking anonymously because they weren’t authorized to discuss the subject, said: “We're supposed to be the department that people look to for actual facts — these are lies.” The official added: “These are real people's lives that they're messing with.”
A report before the evidence
The report, “Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology?,” hadn’t undergone peer review. Its underlying data and funding weren’t available when NPR published its account. One author said the data would be released “soon.” HHS didn’t respond to NPR’s interview request, and other report authors declined interview requests.
The report’s authors, including graduate students at Rutgers University, said they surveyed around 1,200 adults through a paid online platform. They asked about support for gender-affirming medical care, government censorship and aspects of capitalism. Participants also answered whether violence was justified against Charlie Kirk, described in the article as a pro-Trump political organizer assassinated in 2025; President Donald Trump; and Brian Thompson, a health insurance CEO killed by Luigi Mangione in 2024.
The report uses “gender ideology” interchangeably with gender-affirming care, described in the article as the accepted medical and mental health standard of care for transgender patients. Its central claim links support for that care to “Left-Wing Authoritarianism” and “a willingness to justify political violence.” The report says “gender ideology may function as an ideological accelerant,” identifying an enemy and making violence seem legitimate to people already disposed toward force.
Alexander Tsai, a psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School, wrote that the “ideological accelerant” conclusion isn’t supported by the data presented. Liliana Mason, a political psychologist at Johns Hopkins University who has researched support for political violence for more than a decade, said: “If I were to be a peer reviewer for this paper, I would recommend that it be rejected. I just don't believe that it's written in good faith and the measures are not well validated.”
Who gets cast as a threat
Mason said the survey sample overrepresented Democrats compared with U.S. political demographics and left out research context showing approval of political violence on both sides among people with the strongest partisan identities. “What they're saying is 'these people on the left are dangerous people. They are politically violent.' [They're saying this] without putting into context how common these attitudes are across the political spectrum,” she said.
Mason also questioned the “Left-Wing Authoritarianism” scale. She said discussion of the widely used “Right-Wing Authoritarianism” scale, developed after World War II, found that it mostly measures attitudes associated with conservatism. Researchers have developed less partisan measures, she said, including one based on values about raising children. “It's going backwards,” Mason said of the left-wing scale, adding that it measures political alignment more than authoritarian personality.
Colin Wright, an evolutionary biologist with the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing policy think tank, co-authored the report. He said the paper would eventually go to a scientific journal and argued that its lack of peer review “does not make it pseudoscience.” Wright said the study’s purpose wasn’t to argue that violence is uniquely left-wing or that right-wing authoritarianism and violence are unimportant. He also defended the scale, writing on X that studies using it had accumulated thousands of citations and that critics called the new study “nakedly political.”
The report is part of a wider HHS campaign challenging gender-affirming care. In August 2026, the Trump administration announced it would end Medicaid and CHIP funding for gender-affirming care for youth. An HHS review characterized evidence supporting the care models as “very low-quality” and urged greater reliance on psychotherapy. Doctors and pediatricians disputed that claim, saying clinical recommendations often rely on nuanced considerations and could also be classified as based on “low-quality” evidence. Supportive talk therapy already plays a prominent role in gender-affirming treatment models, and a recent study found that less than 0.1% of American minors with private insurance receive puberty-blocking medication or gender-affirming hormones.
The machinery moves downstream
Career HHS staff told NPR they didn’t know about the research before its public release. Andrew Ortiz, an attorney with the Transgender Law Center, said the administration opened its term with anti-trans executive orders and pushed agencies to implement them. He said HHS messaging coincided with a substantial increase over the previous five years in state bills seeking to restrict transgender people’s access to gender-affirming health care and public services and spaces, including bathrooms and sports.
Ortiz said calls to the center’s help desk surged after Trump took office in 2025, with many callers seeking advice about leaving the United States. The account describes people seeking help, not a policy remedy from the agencies issuing the directives.
Weeks before the gender-ideology report appeared in August 2026, HHS released “Wolves in White Coats,” accusing doctors and hospitals of pressuring youth into gender-affirming surgeries and using fraudulent billing practices. Vice President Vance cited that report when asking the Justice Department to investigate dozens of hospitals. The earlier HHS review, released in 2025 without peer review or named contributors, was later found to have been written mostly by advocates against gender-affirming care, with no contributors from major medical groups.
The report’s authors describe their work as a first systematic empirical look at violence connected to gender ideology. Wright said on X that it was “only the first” in a series he is working on with the research team. HHS holds the institutional megaphone; the report hasn’t answered questions about its evidence, funding and review process.