Activists come together for the rights of transgender people at the National Mall in Washington DC last month.Credit: Kayla Bartkowski / Getty
While the National Institutes of Health (NIH) American continue to Fund almost all transgender health research projectsThe White House ordered the agency to focus on studying the “regret” after a person transferred to align their body with their gender identity. Several NIH employees, who have obtained anonymity because they are not allowed to speak to the press, have confirmed the directive of Nature.
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Two weeks ago, Matthew Memoli, who was part of the director of NIH at the time, sent an email to the directors of several NIH institutes. He said that the Ministry of Health and Social Services (HHS), which is the NIH parental agency, “was responsible for financed research in some specific areas” linked to what he calls “chemical and surgical mutilations” of children and adults – a reference to care and surgery that assert the gender. “This is very important for the president and the secretary” of the HHS, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, added the email.
Based on its priorities, the White House sometimes directs the NIH – The largest public funder in the world in biomedical science – To study certain major subjects, such as cancer or women’s health, but the specificity of the last directive, inflammatory language and concentration on a hyper-polarizing subject are unprecedented, say NIH employees. Although the White House can sometimes “push us on different things, we normally manage to draw the approach,” says a staff member.
Many scientists, in shock from the steep cancellation of more than $ 180 million in NIH funding for transgender health research, criticized the proposed studies as ideologically motivated.
“It is really trans pigeons with this medical objective where the only important thing to know about them is that they are looking for a medical transition” and regret it, explains Harry Barbee, who studies the health of people of the sexes and sexual minorities (LGBT +) at John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland, and is identified as non -binary and quer. “When ideology is priority over scientific merit, which threatens the entire scientific business.”
The NIH and the White House did not respond to NatureRequests on new research priorities or the concerns of scientists regarding their apparent ideological fold. HHS has said that “NIH prioritizes research that serves the best interests in public health, not ideological programs, and will continue to support studies that provide clear and objective data – in particular with regard to the long -term effects of gender transitions.”
Changing focus
Estimates suggest that 1.6 million people in the United States identify as transgender and approximately a quarter of them obtain surgeries affirming the sexes. The research suggests1 This access to these procedures can reduce anxiety, depression and suicidal ideas in transgender people.
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US President Donald Trump signed a decree on the first day in power On January 20, which ordered the US government to stop recognizing that sex can differ from sex at birth. The cancellation of numerous research subsidies on trans-health quickly followed, and now the agency seems to move the type of research it finances. Memoli’s email, obtained by NatureSpecifies two research areas that the Trump administration wishes to finance on the “social transition”, that is to say when a person changes the way in which he expresses his sex to others-for example, by changing his name or appearance.
These include “regret and detransions after social transition as well as the chemical and surgical mutilation of children and adults” and “the results of children who have undergone a social transition and / or chemical and surgical mutilations”, says email.
Additional research on the experience of trans people – including understanding the reasons for dissatisfaction after the transition – is very necessary, says Barbee. But they fear that the only emphasis on negative consequences will be moved: less than 1% of transgender people who undergo surgery affirmed by sex regret it, according to an analysis published by Barbee and their colleagues2. In comparison, 14.4% of the larger population reports that regret after any type of surgery3.
Until now, around 187 subsidies in NIH finance trans-health research Online effort to follow the Trump team searches cuts By Brittany Charlton, epidemiologist at the Harvard Th Chan School of Public Health in Boston, Massachusetts, who studies LGBT + Health, and his colleagues. In 2023, the NIH financed around 180 projects in this area, according to another NIH employee.
If these proposed studies are progressing, this will create a “distorted research ecosystem where only politically favorable results are allowed to exist” and an “emptiness of evidence for clinicians who try to do good by their patients,” says Barbee.
