Yesterday afternoon, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it had published a new report titled “Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology?” Coming only two weeks after the HHS published another report that alleged widespread billing fraud in gender-affirming care for minors, the relatively short 20-page study concludes that “support for “gender-affirming” norms is strongly associated with broader authoritarian attitudes, not just political identity, and predicts support for political violence.” In doing so, it marks a dramatic escalation in the conservative fixation on ‘transgender violence’ that has particularly crystalized over the past 12 months, providing rhetorical legitimacy to the concept and expanding it to encompass trans people’s allies.
But despite what the Trump administration would have you believe, this study is far from scientific. Even in its first sentence, its partisan nature is made abundantly clear. “For decades,” the study reads, “psychological research on attitudes toward individuals who identify as transgender has focused almost exclusively on prejudice and has attributed that prejudice to authoritarian dispositions presumed to reside on the political right.”
And worse, the authors of the study appear to be just as partisan. The study lists five, and unsurprisingly, all have shown support for conservatism or right-wing causes in the past. Here’s what you should know about each of them:
Ohad Fedida is a Ph.D. student at Rutgers University in New Jersey and, according to his Twitter bio, a research fellow at an organization called the Network Contagion Research Institute. It’s also worth mentioning that Fedida got his undergraduate degree from the Talmudic University in Miami, a highly conservative Orthodox Jewish men’s college that specializes in Orthodox Jewish theological studies.”
Danit Finkelstein is also a Ph.D. student at Rutgers and is a co-founder of the Network Contagion Research Institute. Finkelstein has publicly supported Trump in the past, recently writing an article defending the Trump administration’s unprecedented cuts to scientific research.
Colin Wright is an evolutionary behavioral psychologist, a fellow at the conservative think tank Manhattan Institute, and the editor-in-chief of an anti-trans right-wing media outlet called “Reality’s Last Stand.” As Transitics reported in April, Wright was previously hired by the state of Montana to defend its ban on birth certificate gender marker changes, and the majority ruling ultimately called him out on misgendering the plaintiffs he was claiming to analyze.
Lee Jussim is a psychology professor at Rutgers who is particularly notable for having spent the last decade arguing that diversity and bias training lead to false claims of racism. Jussim, Wright, and Danit Finkelstein recently co-authored an article arguing against banning caste discrimination that appeared in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
Finally, Joel Finkelstein is the other co-founder and the ‘chief science officer’ of the Network Contagion Research Institute. His relationship to Danit is unclear. In recent months and under his direction, the NCRI has published a series of reports accusing the progressive political organization Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) of being a foreign actor, with one of Finkelstein’s employees even appearing before Congress to testify on the issue in February.
The study itself reflects these beliefs. According to the report, the researchers measured ‘justification for political violence’ by asking respondents whether they thought six real and hypothetical instances of political violence were justified on a 5-point scale: “killing Charlie Kirk, killing Donald Trump, killing Brian Thompson [the United Healthcare CEO who was assassinated by Luigi Mangione], arson of ICE buildings, damaging wealthy people’s property, and violence against police.”
Notably missing from this list are distinctly right-wing instances of political violence, including the assassination of Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband in their home last year, the Pulse nightclub shooting, the plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, last year’s assassination attempt on Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro (and the subsequent arson of the governor’s mansion), and the 2022 attack on Paul Pelosi. It goes without saying that a truly scientific study on popular support for political violence—and note that the study does specifically use the term ‘political violence in its conclusion without qualifying it with ‘left-wing’—would not exclusively ask respondents about only one side of that violence; any study that does so will always conclude the side it asks about to be ‘more violent’ than the other.
Meanwhile, as part of the questions meant to gauge support for ‘gender ideology,’ respondents were also asked “to rate how likely it is that transgender people are facing genocide in the United States.” This so-called ‘Trans-Genocide Belief’ was mentioned in the conclusion as ‘deserving note’ for being “predicted to more strongly relate to ‘Clinical Gender Affirmation Scale’ [a metric invented by the authors to measure support for trans rights] and left-wing authoritarianism than to political identity and to be associated with elevated justification for political violence.” Although ‘Trans-Genocide Belief’ is essentially framed by the authors as being unreasonable, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention has issued repeated red flag alerts stating that the US is in the early stages of a trans genocide.
Lastly, to measure ‘left-wing authoritarian tendencies,’ the authors asked respondents to rate their agreement with 13 statements, this time on a 7-point scale. Like before, those statements were highly biased:
Of these statements, only number 9, “classroom discussions should be safe places that protect students from disturbing ideas,” is likely to be agreed with by conservatives despite the fact that authoritarian tendencies are prevalent across both sides of the political spectrum. But, if the wording is changed slightly on many of these statements—such as number 7 to “wokeness and gender ideology need to be abolished,” number 8 to “all political liberals are fools,” and number 10 to “university authorities are right to ban woke speech from campus”—they would now only apply to conservatives while remaining just as authoritarian. And yet, the study still purports to be measuring a respondent’s ‘authoritarian disposition’ as a whole.
By designing the study this way, the authors ensured that virtually nobody who is opposed to trans people’s rights would be characterized as violent, authoritarian, or an extremist. And just to make sure, the study also featured heavy sampling bias. Of the 1,208 respondents, a whopping 55% self-identified as Democrats, while only 27.2%—less than half the previous number—declared themselves to be Republicans.
Rather glaringly, it also fails to establish a neutral baseline and instead exclusively compares left-wing support for left-wing political violence with right-wing support for left-wing political violence when drawing its conclusions. Worse, the authors themselves specifically note that the study only measures correlation—not causality—and that “a second study is being designed” to determine the causal link.
Through these facts, one thing is made certain: this study was conducted with a predetermined conclusion in mind. After all, the report was specifically commissioned by the HHS to address the topic, and that commission came almost a year after the Trump administration first started floating the idea of ‘transgender violence.’ In fact, Open Science Framework (OSF) data shows that an earlier iteration of the study was only registered on June 15th, 2026, but was withdrawn a week later and subsequently refiled due to some of the proposed survey questions being modified.
Nevertheless, the study is already being wielded as a weapon. Conservative news outlet The New York Post is already peddling it as having “found that those normalizing transgender beliefs were more likely to be supportive of political violence.” Another right-wing outlet, the Washington Examiner, is characterizing it as having “found that individuals radicalized by gender ideology are substantially more likely to believe political violence is justified.” Meanwhile, the HHS has declared that “the association between sex-rejecting clinical beliefs, authoritarian attitudes, and the justification of political violence warrants serious scientific scrutiny,” also claiming that “the study also found that people who more strongly endorsed the sex-rejecting positions measured by the CGAS were more likely to justify political violence.”
Although it remains to be seen how exactly it will be used by the Trump administration and other actors, HHS ‘studies’ like this have typically only brought escalation. The HHS’ gender-affirming care report from last year was the catalyst for renewed efforts to crackdown on gender-affirming care for minors, ultimately resulting in a number of federal rules targeting it through Medicaid and Medicare as well as attempts to obtain trans kids’ medical records. On the ‘transgender violence’ side of things, the Trump administration has already been trying to make it more difficult for trans Americans to purchase firearms, and in September 2025, the FBI even went as far as creating a separate classification for trans ‘nihilistic violent extremists.’
Simply put, whatever this study brings won’t be good. Not for trans people and certainly not for our allies, who now find themselves caught in the crosshairs of conservatives’ unrelenting obsession with the non-existent.
The so called study is ridiculous, but the implications are chilling. I need to get a passport soon, just in case.
Is anyone surprised that an Administration that has enthroned Kennedy Jr as a Cabinet member with the healthcare portfolio is pumping out garbage “research” while Trump makes ridiculous claims about vaccines as measles cases rise.