The National Institute of Justice (NIJ), the research arm of the Department of Justice, has put out a call for researchers to study an alleged connection between gender dysphoria and violent crime. A successful application will lead to up to $1 million in federal funding to “Generate foundational research on gender dysphoria, its treatment, and the perpetration of violence and violent behavior.”
“It looks to me that the administration’s already decided what it wants the science to say,” Policy Director for the Transgender Law Center, Meghan Maury, told Science, expressing concerns that this research could be used to justify future anti-trans policies.
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The Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) went out earlier this month for a project titled “Research on Gender Dysphoria and Violent Crime.” While it claims this should be foundational research, the notice acknowledges there is limited empirical evidence on the matter. Rather than seeking experts to conduct thorough and rigorous research, the DOJ is instead asking for researchers to fill the evidence gaps with “retrospective, secondary data analyses” from existing data sets.
The department wants these analyses to focus on “post-conviction” data and on “individuals who have been incarcerated,” and to include “analyses examining the relationship between violence and gender dysphoria diagnosis and/or treatment.”
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Rather than looking at patterns among a wider range of violent crime or the wider trans population, the administration is looking only at those who have committed violent crimes as a way to create the patterns they wish to see. One psychiatrist and researcher at the Harvard Medical School, Alexander Tsai, told Science that this approach is “likely to produce estimates of elevated crime rates.”
The funding offer from the NIJ comes after the Trump administration conducted massive science funding cuts through the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to align with its anti-DEI policies and executive orders.
Those cuts and other administration policies have meant that federal funding is largely withheld from any project that acknowledges trans identities as genuine and uses the appropriate language (in its own documents, the administration has replaced “gender-affirming care” with “sex-rejecting procedures”).
Because of those changes in terminology, this research will likely only move forward by pathologizing trans identities. That “mental illness,” under this research opportunity, will then be tied to violent crime.
The Federal Policy Director for the Williams Institute, Elena Redfield, told Science that “gender dysphoria” as a term isn’t used in most datasets, as it is a clinical diagnosis that is part of medical records and therefore protected by HIPAA. Redfield said it is “very unclear” what data researchers will be able to use, or how it could be ethically obtained.
“If you’re instructed from the beginning that you can’t actually recognize the humanity of a population or their self-determined language, then it automatically sets the research off on the wrong foot,” Redfield said.
Outside of the lack of empirical evidence, there seems to be no legitimate research that suggests any connection between trans people and violence. Tsai told Science, “I’m not aware of a literature on gender dysphoria and violence perpetration.”
This research funding opportunity seems to be based on the same flawed logic that was used by the Heritage Foundation last year when it pushed for the FBI to create a new domestic terror threat category for “Transgender Ideology-Inspired Violent Extremism” (TIVE). The group claimed, “Experts estimate that 50% of all major (non-gang related) school shootings since 2015 have involved or likely involved transgender ideology.”
That claim came from a skewed analysis of only eight shootings, while at the time the Gun Violence Archive documented 5,748 mass shootings that took place in the US between 2013 and 2025. Only five shooters have been identified as trans, nonbinary, or as having received gender-affirming care, meaning that only 0.087% of mass shooters were trans, while studies suggest that 1-2% of the US population identify as trans. Statistically, trans people are significantly less likely to commit a mass shooting than a cis male.
The DOJ’s push this to create new “research” to support its anti-trans efforts is similar to previous attempts to create evidence to support an anti-trans agenda, including research into trans “regret,” or an HHS August report, Wolves in White Coats: How Doctors and Hospitals Pushed and Profited from the Fraud of “Gender Medicine,” of which Kelley Robinson, President of the Human Rights Campaign said “You cannot hand-pick a panel of anti-transgender activists, feed it research from anti-trans advocacy organizations, publish the result under an HHS banner, and call that independent science.”
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