The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia. (AP Photo/David Goldman)
If you searched “transgender” on the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website on January 19—the day before President Donald Trump took office—you’d find helpful information about HIV, gender-affirming resources, and the high rate of diabetes among the LGBTQ+ community.
If you make the same web query on the CDC.gov now, those webpages bring you an error message: “The page you’re looking for was not found.”
Information about trans people, gender identity, and disease prevention was edited or removed from the CDC’s website by Friday, according to the Washington Post. The removals coincided with the CDC and other government agencies—the Departments of Transportation and Energy—instructing employees last week to remove their pronouns from email signatures. An employee of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission also told Mother Jones they were told verbally to remove their pronouns.
Both efforts were spurred by an executive order Trump signed on his first day in office, in which he declared, “it is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female.” The memo included several directives for government agencies, including instructions for them to cease issuing passports with the “X” gender-marker, “to remove all statements, policies, regulations, forms, communications, or other internal and external messages that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology,” and to “take all necessary steps, as permitted by law, to end the Federal funding of gender ideology.”
These changes won’t just make it harder for individuals to seek information they can use in their personal lives, but they may also stifle research that helps identify links between age, race, gender, socioeconomic status and public health risks. For example, data from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System, a national survey conducted every two years (I personally remember taking it in school) among high school students, is currently not available on the CDC site. Data from that survey previously has been used to understand children’s’ use of weapons and drugs, as well as suicidality.
In the first two weeks of his second presidential term, Trump has also directed his attorney general to investigate teachers who “unlawfully facilitat[e] the social transition of a minor student.” According to the executive order, reported by my colleague Madison Pauly, possible offenses include an educator calling a student by their trans name and pronouns or allowing a student to use the restroom aligned with their gender identity. Yet another executive order instructs federal agencies to start taking steps to eliminate gender-affirming treatments for individuals up to the age of 19.
The Trump Administration’s obsession with this issue is disproportionate to the number of Americans and children who identify as non-binary or seek gender-affirming healthcare. Fewer than 2 percent of adults in the US say their gender is different from their assigned sex at birth, according to Pew Research Center. Moreover, a recent survey of 5.1 million kids in JAMA-pediatrics found that only 0.017 percent of youth were coded as trans and received puberty blockers, while 0.037 percent were trans and accessed hormone therapy.
