Late last week the Department of Health and Human Services published another in a string of dubious reports relating to transgender Americans. The report, entitled “Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm LeftWing Authoritarian Psychology?” purports to link institutional support for trans acceptance in major medical groups with violence, using an online survey of 1208 Americans, only 13 of whom identified as either transgender or gender nonconforming.
The new report has not been published in an academic journal or subjected to peer review, meaning it has not undergone the crucial quality assurance steps required for academic research. Its authors consist of Republican partisans such as Colin Wright of the conservative Manhattan Institute.
The report’s authors claim to have found a correlation between trans-accepting beliefs in their survey group of 99 percent cisgender people with something they call ‘left wing authoritarianism,’ and with believing political violence is justified towards targets such as Charlie Kirk or Donald Trump. The underlying scales are new and untested, and the report doesn’t quantify how common any of the relevant beliefs are, potentially a red flag for overstating the importance of rare results.
The authors caution that institutions that promote acceptance of transgender people, such as the American Medical Association, may cause people to endorse political violence. They omit the fact that actual incidents of terrorist violence are vastly more likely to come from the far right.
While the HHS document is an outgrowth of the Trump administration’s anti-trans politics, it’s more than that. Along with similar pseudo-scientific reports it plays a role in the administration’s war on science and expertise. By impugning the empirical findings of major medical organizations as ideology while wrapping ideology in a scientific-seeming wrapper, this report constitutes one more step away from having faith in verifiable, repeatable research and towards a view of science as ideology with fancier words.
Conservatives in general (and Colin Wright in particular), have long devalued social science disciplines, holding up examples of weak or fraudulent work whose findings they don’t like. They tar diverse disciplines with the brush of ideological capture, hoping to detach public policy from the observable reality that inequality and prejudice cause real world harm.
When conservatives produce these sorts of documents resembling social science papers, as they did here, their output must be understood in the context of ideologues who neither know nor care when social science is actually done well. Their goal is not to increase people’s knowledge about attitudes towards violence but to intentionally produce bad social science in part to muddy the waters and provide cherry-pickable “studies” for other partisans to cite, but also to support their position that all social science is bad. They seek a world of pure ideology, where decisions are made for reasons of profit or of vibes and no one is ever burdened by an inconvenient truth.
