After a month of dismantling more than $180 million in national research on trans health, meaning research in support of the health of trans people, the White House has reportedly directed the National Institutes of Health to conduct "research" on the "regret" people may feel after transitioning, Max Kozlov reported Friday in Nature. I say "research" because this directive will not actually fund any research, but rather spawn propaganda. Matthew Memoli, an infectious diseases researcher who served as acting director of the NIH, who, incredibly, at one point refused to be vaccinated against COVID-19, wrote an email to the NIH directing that new research be funded in "a few specific areas," including the “chemical and surgical mutilation” of children and adults—the conservative colloquialism for gender-affirming care and surgery—and social transition, in which a person transitions with no medical intervention.
It feels almost stupid to state the obvious—which feels increasingly less like a risk, as no major national publication has covered this new directive after Nature's scoop—this is not how research is done. This is not bad science; it's not science. Science is driven by open inquiry, not fixed outcomes. Funneling money into "research" to find evidence of a predetermined belief will not result in any actual science, but rather disinformation disguised as science. It feels equally stupid to point out the irony that the Department of Health and Human Services told Kozlov that "NIH is prioritizing research that serves the best interests of public health, not ideological agendas, and will continue to support studies that provide clear, objective data — particularly regarding the long-term effects of gender transitions." The ongoing research on trans health was not ideological, as HHS claims, but rather driven by curiosity and a fundamental belief that all people deserve to live healthy lives. Whatever results emerge from this directive will not only be ideological, it will be a sham.
We could all dismiss this as stupid if it weren't so terrifying. Last week Donald Trump released a proclamation tied to National Child Abuse Prevention Month, stating: "Proponents of the gender ideology movement are outrageously indoctrinating our children with the devastating lie that they are trapped in the wrong body — and that the only way they can be truly happy is to alter their sex with hormone therapy, puberty blockers, and sexual mutilation surgery." While the White House's ongoing attacks have largely remain focused on trans kids and adolescents, the new NIH directive reminds us of its grander plan: to eliminate trans people, of all ages, from public life. Fabricating "research" that argues young people should not transition makes it easier to demonize and dehumanize trans people and legislate away their care. Once you ban kids and adolescents from transitioning it paves the way to stripping trans adults of those rights as well. This has always been the intent behind scaremongering around trans kids and trans athletes.
Researchers have, of course, already studied the level of regret among trans people who undergo gender-affirming care, especially surgery. All evidence suggests that less than one percent of trans people regret their surgeries, a number that is vanishingly smaller than the regret levels of women who have elected to get breast augmentation (5 to 9 percent) or people who elected for knee replacements (between 6 and 30 percent) or bariatric surgery (up to nearly 20 percent). Frankly, the medical procedure most in need of a systematic review of patient regret is the Brazilian butt lift, which is the deadliest procedure in plastic surgery.
The most prevalent reason why some trans people do regret their gender-affirming surgeries has less to do with their own bodily fulfillment but society—rejection from family or society in their changed bodies. Given all the data, it strikes me that an actually meaningful line of inquiry into regret would instead mean investigating the barriers that prevent people of all ages from transitioning. There is little medical care about or curiosity into the much more widespread regret many trans people have that they did not, or, more likely, could not, transition earlier.
But of course, these new NIH "studies" will not find further evidence confirming the already exhaustively proven one percent rate of regret. Whatever publications emerge from this new directive will tout their manufactured percentages that prove what they want to prove, and these "studies" will be used to strip trans people of their ability to access medications, defund facilities that provide hormones or surgeries, and thin out the already limited list of procedures covered under insurance. They will make it financially, socially, and emotionally more difficult to transition. This will not change the number of trans people—this, at least, is beyond the power of the federal government—but it will mean that fewer trans people are able to transition, medically and socially. Trans people whose insurance no longer covers their hormones may be forced to detransition. Trans people who are not yet out may never come out. Trans people will suffer, and as a result of being deprived care that decreases rates of depression and suicidality, some might die.
That all of this is a sham will be obvious to fewer people than it should be. The vast majority of people cannot distinguish an actually vetted scientific study from another; why should they need to? It doesn't help that mainstream publications will cite sham scientific journals with the same credulity with which they cite real ones like Science and Nature. In one of her worst New York Times columns—which is saying a lot—Pamela Paul cited a study about detransitioners in a journal called The Archives of Sexual Behavior, a journal that was founded in the 1970s by a sexologist named Richard Green who believed conversion therapy could make gender nonconforming children grow up to merely be gay. The journal is now led by the sexologist Kenneth Zucker, who also treats gender nonconforming children with a type of conversion therapy and was fired from his Toronto clinic in 2015.
Would you believe that a journal like this would prioritize publishing studies that spurn the scientific method in support of unscientific phenomena like rapid onset gender dysphoria? The Archives of Sexual Behavior has never retracted a paper from 1997, "Physical attractiveness of girls with gender identity disorder," that asked medical students to rate the "physical attractiveness" of 6- to 8-year-old girls and found that "girls with gender identity disorder had significantly less attractive ratings than the normal control girls," a study that is perverted in too many ways to get into right now. I have no doubt that the Archives of Sexual Behavior would be happy to publish whatever freshly manufactured studies the NIH plans to fund. Will outlets like the New York Times cover this new "research" with any of this context? Only time will tell, but if the past is any cue, it seems unlikely.
Our national research institutes, which have chugged along for years seeking to improve the health outcomes of all Americans, trans or otherwise, are now being transformed for cruelly ideological goals. The best analogy I can think of for the future of this research is the relationship between a wasp and a social spider in Latin America. The spiders live in colonies of thousands, spinning basket-shaped webs near the jungle floor. These cooperative systems allow the spiders to protect their eggs and raise their young together, as well as tackle larger prey like grasshoppers that far outmatch a single spider. The larval wasp lurks by the edges of this colony, where it waits to launch itself on a young spider and feed on its abdomen. As the larva grows, it gains control of the spider's brain and influences it to leave the colony and weave itself into a ball of silk. Once inside this protected silk chamber, the wasp will devour the spider and make its own cocoon to molt into an adult.
So, you see—the spider was hijacked and its body and power manipulated by the wasp for its own purposes. Do the other spiders know when one of their own is taken, hollowed out, and possessed? Surely other creatures take no notice; they have their own lives to protect in the wild of the jungle. We can only watch as the colony is slowly dismantled and repossessed, feeding no one but the wasp. For the spiders, the only thing produced here is death.
