Today, the Department of Health and Human Services released a 20-page pseudoscientific report entitled, “Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology?” The report concludes that “gender ideology is associated with left-wing authoritarianism and willingness to justify political violence,” but its methodology and creation both align with the Trump administration’s general anti-trans crusade.
Right-wing media outlets — like The New York Post, The Daily Caller, Blaze Media, and The Washington Examiner — are already citing the report to paint trans people and their allies as potentially violent. The report is just the administration’s latest move in creating justifications to surveil and prosecute LGBTQ+ and allied groups that regularly challenge the president’s relentlessly anti-democratic and unconstitutional actions.
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The report surveyed 1,208 US adults, only 1.1% of whom identified as transgender/nonbinary and 55% of whom identified as Democrat-leaning. Seeing as other recent surveys showed an estimated 29% of US adults self-identifying as Democratic, the small pool of respondents in this recent report isn’t a nationally representative sample.
The report’s authors invented a “Clinical Gender Affirmation Scale” (CGAS) to measure respondents’ support of trans people. The CGAS asked respondents whether they agreed with five statements affirming the importance of respecting trans people’s gender identities, their gender expression, names, and pronouns, as well as child gender-exploration.
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The report noted that these affirming standards are consistent with the best practices of the American Psychological and Psychiatric Associations, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.
The survey also included 11 questions asking respondents to assess the perceived dangerousness to trans Americans from groups like Republicans, right-wingers, Christians, police, white nationalists, the US Supreme Court, men, white people, cisgender people, and the LGBTQ community; six questions asking about respondents’ support of setting fire to ICE buildings, damaging wealthy people’s property, violence against the police, and the killings of Donald Trump, MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk, and Brian Thompson (the CEO murdered by Luigi Mangione); as well as one question asking whether “transgender people are facing genocide” in the US.
To measure respondents’ “left-wing authoritarian (LWA) tendencies,” the survey also asked respondents to rate on a seven-point scale their agreement with 13 statements.
Tellingly, the study didn’t ask respondents about their feelings on the numerous anti-trans policies being instated by the Trump administration.
The study’s authors correlate “gender ideology” (defined as agreement that trans people’s identities should be respected) with endorsement for LWA. This, the authors claim, is because support of trans people is based on “minority stress theory,” which identifies “oppressors,” “certified victims,” and “an institutionally mandated response” to fight discrimination.
“We propose that gender ideology content functions as a content package for LWA,” the authors wrote. “Failure to affirm [trans people’s identities] becomes a source of physical harm, skepticism toward
affirmation becomes a clinical risk factor, and the clinician’s professional duty extends to
advocacy against the social conditions causing that stress… In this sense, the framework does not merely regulate belief; it can arm authoritarian psychology by activating threat, resentment, punitive certainty, and defensive group identification.”
“Dissent from ‘affirmation’ can be construed not merely as disagreement, but as inducing physical harm, thereby making compelled affirming speech, institutional discipline, and intervention against parental resistance appear morally necessary and clinically protective,” the authors claim, adding that people who support trans people and LWA seek “to exercise that control in a project that aspires to overturn the status quo with respect to sex and family.”
The “junk science” report has conservative right-wingers behind it
In a statement, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) dismissed the report as “junk” that “wastes taxpayer dollars.”
“The entities that conducted the supposed ‘research,’ the Manhattan Institute and the Network Contagion Research Institute, are both known conservative-leaning think tanks with track records of producing reports that align with extremist right-wing positions,” the HRC wrote.
Transgender journalist Aleksandra Vaca noted that the report’s five authors include two co-founders of the so-called Network Contagion Research Institute as well as a research fellow with the institute who collectively have conservative backgrounds, including articles defending the Trump administration’s unprecedented cuts to scientific research and accusing the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) of operating as a foreign actor — Trump’s Department of State released a report accusing the DSA of being anti-American, Cuban-supported subversives just last July.
Vaca noted that one of the authors, Colin Wright, is a Manhattan Institute fellow who was previously hired by Montana’s Republican-led government to defend the state’s ban on changing gender marker on birth certificates. Another of the authors, Lee Jussim, has “spent the last decade arguing that diversity and bias training lead to false claims of racism,” Vaca added.
Trump’s department of health commissioned this study after the president’s January 2025 executive order, which dismissed all studies upholding the necessity of gender-affirming care as “junk science.”
As part of the administration’s aim to discredit gender-affirming care, Trump’s department of health issued a 400-page report around May 2025 that recommended conversion therapy for trans people — the report was completed in just 90 days, identified none of its contributors, underwent no peer review process before publication, and was criticized as “inaccurate” by the nation’s largest pediatric group.
Last May, the Trump Administration released a national counterterrorism strategy that focused wholly on anti-fascist groups (antifa) and attacks prompted by so-called transgender ideology. The report falsely blamed trans people for the recent wave of mass shootings and ignored the fact that acts of domestic terrorism are committed far more often by right-wing groups and foreign agents than by leftist groups.
In September 2025, the justice department deleted a study from its website that showed right-wing violent extremism was outpacing all other types of domestic terrorism. The Trump administration has cut funding for programs designed to counter violent extremism, specifically those focusing on white supremacist ideology, and also filed a flimsy lawsuit against the anti-extremist organization, the Southern Poverty Law Center. Former workers with the department of homeland security have also accused the administration of ignoring their warnings about the rise of domestic right-wing violence.
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