The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) just issued a hastily written report that came to the conclusion that the GOP’s opposition to gender-affirming care for trans kids is supported by science and that what trans kids need instead is conversion therapy to get them to change their gender identities.
In related news from this week, the person in charge of the department that issued that report – HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. – said that the measles vaccine has “aborted fetus debris” in a televised interview.
RFK Jr on measles: "The MMR vaccine contains a lot of aborted fetus debris."
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) May 1, 2025 at 3:11 AM
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Kennedy is a nutjob who espouses wacky, anti-science conspiracy theories, and he should not be in charge of HHS. It’s important to remember that, because for the next four years, Republicans and the Trump administration are going to be citing this anti-trans report as proof that they have the science on their side.
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The report released yesterday claims to be a review of the scientific literature on gender-affirming care for trans youth, an American counterpart to the U.K.’s Cass Report, which has been criticized for ignoring studies that support trans youth. One of the big differences between them is that the U.K.’s report took years to complete while the Trump administration’s report took 90 days.
That is, Kennedy wants us to believe that someone working for him, in just 90 days, was able to read all the studies on gender-affirming care in its various forms, evaluate them, put them in context among themselves and with related medical literature, and produce reliable conclusions.
And somehow this report is supposed to carry more weight than the various mainstream medical organizations – including the American Medical Association, the Endocrine Society, and the American Academy of Pediatrics – that have been supporting gender-affirming care for trans youth for years after their own multiple and ongoing reviews of the scientific literature.
Gender-affirming care can seem like an adult choice instead of the basic, lifesaving health care that it is. And now there’s a government report saying that it’s bad. For a lot of people, that’s as far into it as they’ll look.
As someone who has been writing about LGBTQ+ news for over 15 years, I can say with confidence that no one is capable of comprehending the state of the scientific literature when it comes to gender-affirming care in just 90 days, and they definitely wouldn’t find studies and theories that everyone who has spent their lives studying this issue somehow didn’t see before. The only way a report could be made in 90 days is if someone had a conclusion and just looked for anything that could possibly support it.
And the people who know more about trans health care than anyone else – trans people who work in health policy – are also calling out the report. It’s “a deeply ideological and politically motivated distortion of scientific evidence,” said health policy analyst Sinead Murano-Kinney of Advocates for Trans Equality.
“It lacks the substantial time, rigorous and objective assessments, and strong methodological tools that literature reviews require, and it fails to maintain even a thin veneer of intellectual rigor or objectivity,” she continued. “Public health policy should be achieved through evidence-based constructions of policy, not policy-based constructions of evidence.”
The problem is that, while it’s clear to those of us who follow this issue what’s going on here and which experts to trust, the general public might not be as discerning. Gender-affirming care can seem like a big deal, and a lot of cis people don’t even really comprehend the idea that a gender identity is an entirely different thing from the sex someone is assigned at birth and that a mismatch between the two can cause a lot of distress.
Gender-affirming care can seem like an adult choice instead of the basic, lifesaving health care that it is. And now there’s a government report saying that it’s bad. For a lot of people, that’s as far into it as they’ll look.
Which is why it’s important to put the report into a non-LGBTQ+ context. Yes, it’s an attack on trans people’s identities. It is also part and parcel with the right’s denial of basic science, especially when it comes to medical topics. Most people aren’t capable of understanding how much education and training are required to understand scientific literature – it’s more than just reading a headline of one study out of context – and so they cherry-pick information to support genuinely bonkers medical claims, often fueled by their general resistance to modernity and equal rights for all.
And Kennedy has made so many genuinely bonkers medical claims.
Instead of listening to the experts, Kennedy sticks to his conclusions and makes up conspiracies to justify why the people who are smarter and more educated than he is don’t agree with him.
He is a germ theory denialist, which means that he has claimed that microbes don’t spread disease and suggested that disease is spread because there of a miasma over places that causes people to contract infectious diseases.
He’s an HIV denialist, having written in his book disparagingly about the “orthodoxy that HIV alone causes AIDS” and the “theology that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS” and saying that it’s actually the medications used to help people living with HIV that cause AIDS.
He has even ordered HHS to investigate the “environmental” cause of autism. He claims that there’s a secret government database that contains proof of a link between autism and vaccines.
He has, of course, gone after vaccines for decades. Like in the clip above, where he says that the measles vaccine contains aborted baby debris, he has made it his goal to undermine trust in vaccines, which have saved countless lives since they were first developed. He has claimed that public health officials only support vaccines because they have “conflicts of interest,” something that isn’t true. His anti-vaccine advocacy likely led to a measles outbreak in Samoa in 2019, which killed 83 people. (Not to mention the outbreak of 900 measles cases currently happening in the U.S.)
All of this is important to keep in mind when evaluating his department’s report on the state of the scientific literature on transgender health care. This is someone who is not capable of understanding basic medical concepts like “germs” because he can’t see them. And when he doesn’t understand something, he doesn’t try to understand it better or consult what actual experts think. He doesn’t have the emotional maturity to do anything but get mad at others for saying he’s wrong.
The American Academy of Pediatrics said it wasn’t even consulted for the HHS report and that its point of view was repeatedly misrepresented in it.
“This report misrepresents the current medical consensus and fails to reflect the realities of pediatric care,” American Academy of Pediatrics President Dr. Susan Kressly said.
I’m sure experts in other medical fields would have similar things to say about Kennedy’s approach to their work.
Instead of listening to the experts, Kennedy sticks to his conclusions and makes up conspiracies to justify why the people who are smarter and more educated than he is don’t agree with him.
And, as the saying goes, everything is a conspiracy when you don’t know how anything works.
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