A Department of Health and Human Services report released in August 2026 claims that support for gender-affirming care correlates with left-wing political violence. It hasn’t been peer reviewed. Its data remains locked away. Experts across multiple fields call it pseudoscience dressed up in government credentials.
The report, titled “Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology?” appeared without the standard peer review process that lends scientific research legitimacy. As of September 30, 2026, when NPR published an investigation into the document’s methods and funding sources, its underlying data hadn’t been made public. One author, Colin Wright, said it would be available “soon.” HHS didn’t respond to requests for comment.
This isn’t an isolated move. It’s part of a coordinated administrative push that has alarmed career health officials and independent researchers. In August 2026, the Trump administration announced it would end Medicaid and CHIP funding for gender-affirming care for youth. Weeks later, HHS released another report, “Wolves in White Coats,” accusing doctors of pressuring youth into gender-affirming surgeries through fraudulent billing. That report came with a 12-minute documentary featuring young people who’d detransitioned and cited data from an anti-LGBTQ advocacy group.
The Scientific Consensus Under Attack
Major medical associations have repeatedly affirmed gender-affirming care as standard treatment for transgender patients. Yet HHS has challenged that consensus three times in recent months, each time without proper peer review or transparent sourcing. Career HHS staff told NPR they hadn’t known about the research before its public release. One anonymous health official, authorized to speak only off the record, put it bluntly: “We’re supposed to be the department that people look to for actual facts — these are lies.”
The gender-ideology report’s central claim rests on shaky methods. Researchers, including graduate students at Rutgers University, surveyed roughly 1,200 adults through a paid online platform. They asked about support for gender-affirming care, government censorship, capitalism, and whether respondents believed violence was justified against specific targets—including Charlie Kirk, a pro-Trump political organizer assassinated in 2025, and former president Donald Trump.
Liliana Mason, a political psychologist at Johns Hopkins University who has studied support for political violence for more than a decade, offered a blunt assessment. “If I were to be a peer reviewer for this paper, I would recommend that it be rejected,” she said. “I just don’t believe that it’s written in good faith and the measures are not well validated.”
Mason pointed to several structural problems. The sample included more Democrats than the actual U.S. political demographics would suggest. The study also left out crucial context from her own research: approval of political violence appears across the political spectrum among people with the strongest partisan identities. “What they’re saying is ‘these people on the left are dangerous people. They are politically violent,’” Mason explained. “They’re saying this without putting into context how common these attitudes are across the political spectrum.”
Who Bears the Real Risk
The actual data, meanwhile, contradicts the report’s central premise. Evidence cited in NPR’s investigation indicates transgender people are far more likely to face violence than commit it. Recent research found that less than 0.1% of American minors with private insurance receive puberty-blocking medication or gender-affirming hormones. That figure suggests the supposed epidemic of youth being pushed into these treatments doesn’t exist.
Andrew Ortiz, an attorney with the Transgender Law Center, placed HHS’s actions in a wider context. “This is an administration that started day one with three or four anti-trans executive orders and then really pushed those executive orders on to the agencies and told the agencies to figure out ways to implement them,” he said. He noted that HHS’s 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.
Calls to the Transgender Law Center’s help desk surged after Trump took office in 2025. Many callers wanted advice about leaving the United States. “It doesn’t feel like a coincidence to me that HHS is clearly focused on weird, anti-trans stuff when we have more measles deaths in this country than we’ve had in decades, you can’t eat lettuce or you have to be very careful about what you’re putting in your body,” Ortiz said.
The Political Network Behind the Research
Colin Wright, one of the report’s authors and an evolutionary biologist with the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing policy think tank, sent NPR lengthy responses but stipulated that they couldn’t be published unless reprinted in full. He later posted NPR’s questions and his answers on social media. The other report authors declined interview requests.
Wright’s institutional ties point to a network opposed to gender-affirming care. The HHS report lists his Manhattan Institute association but leaves out his roles with the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine (SEGM) and Genspect’s Killarney Group, organizations that oppose gender-affirming care. A Southern Poverty Law Center report alleges these groups sit at the center of a shifting network of dozens of organizations that use the appearance of science to legitimize anti-LGBTQ aims.
Emerson Hodges, a co-author of the SPLC report, offered a stark assessment: “The reason they have a multitude of groups and they’ve got this sort of hydra situation going on is because they need to look bigger than they actually are in order to be taken seriously.” He said major medical associations have repeatedly confirmed gender-affirming care as the best model for treating transgender patients.
Wright began speaking out against DEI initiatives in academia in 2020 and later sued Cornell University over what he called anti-white discrimination. In 2023, three years before the HHS report’s release, he replied to a social media post by Elon Musk, saying he would support criminalizing gender-affirming care for minors. Wright wrote: “I would love to work with you on this.” He described himself as a lifelong liberal committed to nonpartisan work, but his public record tells a different story.
Adrian Shanker, a former deputy assistant secretary for health policy at HHS in the Biden administration, described the approach as unusual. “The department had longstanding contracts with generalist science writing firms. They were not political in any way,” Shanker said of his previous experience. “That’s vastly different from how this administration seems to already have the answers for the reports they’re publishing before they start. And they’re partnering with politically-aligned researchers and think tanks to develop reports that meet a political conclusion rather than a scientific one.”
Alexander Tsai, a psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School, wrote in response to the paper that its “ideological accelerant” conclusion isn’t supported by the data presented. The administration’s promise of “Gold Standard Scientific Research” and federal health agencies as “beacons of Transparency” rings hollow when the data remains unavailable and the research lacks standard scientific rigor.
Institutional Accountability and Democratic Oversight
Early in Trump’s second term, the Office of Assistant Secretary for Health changed the nameplate beneath Admiral Rachel Levine’s portrait—from her current legal name to her birth name. Levine, a transgender woman, served as assistant secretary for health during the Biden administration. An HHS spokesperson defended the decision, saying the agency’s priority was ensuring “biological reality guides our approach to public health.”
This pattern shows how public health institutions can be turned away from evidence-based care and toward ideological ends. The HHS reports aren’t accidents or isolated missteps. They reflect a deliberate strategy to build a rhetorical and pseudo-scientific case for restricting access to care validated by medical professionals. Hodges noted: “If [HHS] can make the argument that anyone who supports trans rights is more likely to be politically violent and politically aggressive, then it makes it easier to demonize their opponents and to try and criminalize trans people.”
Wright said the HHS report is “only the first” in a series he’s working on with the research team. The pattern points to more reports ahead, each intended to bolster the case against gender-affirming care without waiting for peer review or independent validation.
Why This Matters:
When federal health agencies—institutions meant to protect public health through evidence-based policy—become vehicles for predetermined ideological conclusions, scientific expertise loses its integrity. This report shows how government agencies can manufacture doubt about established medical standards, not through rigorous research but through selective sampling, omitted context, and unvetted conclusions released without peer review. HHS actions affect transgender youth and adults seeking medical care, families making health decisions, and doctors trying to provide evidence-based treatment. By ending Medicaid and CHIP coverage for gender-affirming care while releasing reports that link support for such care to political violence, the administration is using multiple levers of power to restrict access and reshape the debate. Career health officials see this as a break from how public health institutions should work. The stakes go beyond any single policy: when government uses its scientific authority to advance political goals instead of public welfare, democratic accountability and institutional trust suffer alongside the people directly affected.