A Department of Health and Human Services report linking support for gender-affirming care to political violence has drawn sharp criticism from academic researchers, who question its methods, data transparency, and scientific validity. Published in August 2026 without peer review, it has become the latest flashpoint in debates over how federal health agencies conduct and present research.
The unreviewed HHS document, titled “Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology?,” made headlines when NPR reported on it September 30, 2026. At publication, the underlying data and funding sources remained unavailable to the public. One of the report’s authors said the data would be released “soon.”
The Transparency Problem
The Trump administration and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have repeatedly emphasized their commitment to “Gold Standard Scientific Research” and making federal health agencies “beacons of Transparency.” The report’s lack of peer review and data access stands in stark contrast to those stated goals.
Adrian Shanker, a former deputy assistant secretary for health policy at HHS in the Biden administration, told NPR that the current approach differs fundamentally from established practice. “The department had longstanding contracts with generalist science writing firms. They were not political in any way,” Shanker said. The current administration’s method appears reversed: “They seem 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.”
Career HHS staff raised similar concerns. An unnamed HHS health official told NPR: “We’re supposed to be the department that people look to for actual facts — these are lies.” The official added that the report misrepresents the scale of the issue: “This is not a real issue; they’re depicting it as being bigger and more important than it actually is and skewing the facts.”
Methodological Concerns
The report’s central claim—that support for gender-affirming care correlates with “Left-Wing Authoritarianism” and willingness to justify political violence—rests on a survey of around 1,200 adults conducted through a paid online platform. Respondents answered questions about support for gender-affirming medical care, government censorship, and capitalism. They were also asked whether they believed violence was justified against specific targets, including Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated in 2025; President Donald Trump; and Brian Thompson, a health insurance CEO killed by Luigi Mangione in 2024.
Liliana Mason, a political psychologist at Johns Hopkins University with more than a decade of research on support for political violence, offered a blunt assessment. “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,” Mason said.
Mason pointed to several serious flaws. The survey sample overrepresented Democrats compared with actual U.S. political demographics, she said. More significantly, the study left out context from her own research showing that 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.”
Mason also criticized the report’s “Left-Wing Authoritarianism” scale as methodologically backward. She noted that academic discussion has found the widely used “Right-Wing Authoritarianism” scale, developed after World War II, measures attitudes associated with conservatism. Researchers later developed less partisan measures. “It’s going backwards,” Mason said of the new approach. “This is just the same problem that we had with Right-Wing Authoritarianism as a measure. First of all, it’s not really measuring authoritarian personality. And second of all, it’s really just measuring how closely associated you are with the Democratic Party.”
Colin Wright, an evolutionary biologist with the Manhattan Institute and one of the report’s authors, defended the research while acknowledging its limits. He said the paper would eventually go to a scientific journal and argued that being unreviewed doesn’t make it “pseudoscience.” On the authoritarianism scale, Wright said another measure “would not have improved the research and would have made it a different study.” He noted that studies using the Right-Wing Authoritarianism scale “go back decades and have amassed thousands of citations. But we publish a study using a well-validated Left-Wing Authoritarianism scale, and link it to some problematic outcomes, and the left goes insane and call it ‘nakedly political.’”
Alexander Tsai, a psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School, was just as skeptical. He wrote that the report’s “ideological accelerant” conclusion—that support for gender-affirming care acts as an accelerant, telling left-wing authoritarian psychology who the enemy is and when violence is justified—“isn’t supported by the data presented.”
Part of a Broader Pattern
This report marks the third recent HHS effort to reject gender-affirming standards of care. In August 2026, the Trump administration announced it would end Medicaid and CHIP funding for gender-affirming care for youth, based on an HHS review that described the evidence supporting such care as “very low-quality.” Doctors and pediatricians disputed that characterization, noting that many active clinical care recommendations could also be classified as based on “low-quality” evidence and that supportive talk therapy already figures prominently in gender-affirming treatment models. A recent study found that less than 0.1% of American minors with private insurance receive puberty-blocking medication or gender-affirming hormones.
Weeks before HHS released the gender-ideology report in August 2026, it issued another report, “Wolves in White Coats,” accusing doctors and hospitals of pressuring youth into gender-affirming surgeries and fraudulent billing practices. The report appeared alongside a 12-minute “short-form documentary” about young people who had detransitioned and cited data from an anti-LGBTQ advocacy group that also promoted anti-DEI messaging. Vice President Vance later cited the report when asking the Justice Department to investigate dozens of hospitals.
A 2025 HHS review, released without peer review or named contributors, was later found to have been mostly authored by advocates against gender-affirming care, with no contributors from major medical groups. When the Trump administration took office in 2025, HHS staff changed the nameplate beneath Admiral Rachel Levine’s portrait from her current legal name to her birth name, a practice known as “deadnaming.” An HHS spokesperson said the priority was ensuring information “reflects gold standard science” and that “biological reality guides our approach to public health.”
Author Background and Institutional Ties
Wright’s background raises further questions about the report’s objectivity. Three years ago in 2023, he replied to a social media post by Elon Musk about criminalizing gender-affirming changes for minors, saying, “I would love to work with you on this.” Before joining the Manhattan Institute, Wright researched wasp and spider behavior. He began campaigning against DEI initiatives in academia in 2020 and later sued Cornell University over what he described as anti-white discrimination. He describes himself as a speaker “known for his criticisms of gender ideology and defending the reality of biological sex.”
The HHS report lists Wright’s association with the Manhattan Institute but omits his affiliations with the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine (SEGM) and Genspect’s Killarney Group think tank—organizations NPR described as opposing gender-affirming care. Wright maintains an advisor role with SEGM and wrote the opening chapter of a 2026 book commissioned by Genspect. He said listing these would be “misleading to present as current institutional affiliations.”
A Southern Poverty Law Center report alleges that SEGM, Genspect, and similar organizations form a shifting network of dozens of groups that use the appearance of science to legitimize anti-LGBTQ aims. Emerson Hodges, a co-author of the SPLC report, said the multiple organizations exist because “they need to look bigger than they actually are in order to be taken seriously.” He noted that major medical associations have repeatedly confirmed gender-affirming care as the best model for treating transgender patients.
Both SEGM and Genspect rejected the SPLC’s characterization. SEGM stated it “categorically rejects the SPLC’s allegations that we are a ‘hate group’ peddling ‘pseudoscience.’” Genspect called the hate-group designation “a baseless accusation.”
Hodges said other HHS reports on transgender issues also included authors linked to the same network, and that HHS now appears to be the agency where these groups have the most influence. “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,” he said. Wright indicated on social media that the HHS report is “only the first” in a series he’s working on with the research team.
Why This Matters:
Federal health agencies depend on rigorous, transparent scientific processes to maintain credibility. Research released without peer review, with undisclosed funding sources and unavailable data, and involving researchers with known political alignments and ideological commitments to predetermined conclusions, compromises the department’s ability to serve its core function: providing accurate health information to Americans. The pattern—multiple HHS reports advancing similar policy goals, authored by people affiliated with advocacy networks and released without standard scientific vetting—raises fundamental questions about whether political objectives are driving research rather than the reverse. For taxpayers funding these agencies and patients relying on evidence-based medical guidance, the distinction matters enormously. When federal health institutions lose credibility through politicized research practices, the damage reaches far beyond any single policy dispute.