This story was produced in partnership with Important Context, the newsletter of the Accountability Journalism Institute.
Doctors are “wolves,” the Trump administration declares in a 64-page document that portrays the medical professionals who care for young trans people as predators interested only in profit.
The report, “Wolves in White Coats: How Doctors and Hospitals Pushed and Profited from the Fraud of “Gender Medicine,” released last week, is the latest salvo in a broader right-wing campaign targeting transgender people. In the U.S. and abroad, legal attacks on the transgender community have been escalating. These attacks are not limited to the federal level. The Trump administration’s efforts are accompanied by state-level legislation aimed at restricting medical care, access to public bathrooms and athletic participation. The rhetoric on the right has also been escalating. Some genocide scholars warn that the attacks represent the early-to-mid stages of genocide.
Coming two days after the announcement by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services that the agency would cut off Medicaid and CHIP funding for gender-affirming care for minors, the report promises to expose “harm to America’s youth” endemic to such treatment. A review by Important Context, however, reveals that the document is more political than a genuine public health investigation.
It appears instead to be aimed at intimidating providers into cutting off medical care for transgender Americans.
Dubious Authorship
Although the Trump administration has held up “Wolves in White Coats” as a game-changing document, its 10 authors hail not from any major medical association, but rather from the right-wing media and dark money ecosystem. Just three are medical doctors—only two in relevant fields—and all have been outspoken critics of gender-affirming care.
The first listed contributor is Aaron Baer, the president of the Center for Christian Virtue, a Christian Right organization that the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated an anti-LGBTQIA+ hate group. Baer has no medical or public health background, according to his LinkedIn. He graduated from Ohio University in 2009 with a degree in public relations. From there, he went to work at ZooLoo.com, a now defunct web dashboard company, as a marketing and public relations manager.
Two of the authors. Victoria Coley and Neeraja Deshpande, are affiliated with the Independent Women’s Forum, an anti-feminist group with major right-wing funding that has spread misinformation related to gender-affirming care. The group’s past funders have included major names on the right including petrochemical billionaire Charles Koch and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. Coley is IWF’s senior vice president of communications while Deshpande is an IWF policy analyst.
There is also Dr. Aaron Kheriaty. A licensed psychiatrist, Kheriaty was fired from his job at UC-Irvine for refusing the COVID-19 vaccine—a decision he sought to reverse with an unsuccessful lawsuit.
A conservative Catholic, Kheriaty once edited a book on how to identify demonic possession. Kheriaty is a fellow and director of the Program in Bioethics and American Democracy at the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), a Christian Right group backed by conservative legal activist and Trump “judge whisperer” Leonard Leo. EPPC originated the term “sex-rejecting procedures” to refer to gender-affirming care, which the Trump administration has picked up on and appears throughout the HHS report.
Kheriaty is affiliated with a number of other right-wing organizations as well. He is a senior fellow and director of the Health and Human Flourishing Program at the Zephyr Institute, which aims to recruit students at Stanford University. He is also a senior scholar at the Brownstone Institute, an anti-science group known for spreading conspiracy theories and vaccine misinformation.
Kheriaty has long been an ally of the administration. In March, he served as a witness for the president’s Religious Liberty Commission. Three months later, the DOJ settled a censorship lawsuit he had brought against key Biden administration officials in 2023 despite the Supreme Court having previously ruled that he and his co-plaintiffs—including now-NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya and former ACIP chair Martin Kulldorff—lacked standing.
Another author of the “Wolves” report is Dr. Eithan Haim, a general surgeon and trauma surgeon at Hunt Regional Medical Center in Greenville, Texas. The report notes that in May 2023, Haim “anonymously exposed Texas Children’s Hospital’s secret transgender program—which helped spur the passage of state legislation banning pediatric sex-rejecting interventions.” He “also led to an investigation by the Texas attorney general that culminated in a $10 million healthcare fraud settlement with Texas Children’s Hospital and the establishment of the nation’s first detransitioner clinic in May 2026.”
The other report authors include a number of contributors to right-wing publications like The National Review and The Daily Wire.
A Political Document
The “Wolves” report itself appears intended to intimidate providers and medical administrators by making veiled (and not so veiled) threats to retaliate against them for any care that MAGA opposes, which is effectively all care for trans people. It is shot through with inflammatory and prejudicial language—“surgical mutilation” and “sex-rejecting interventions”—and entirely reliant on right-wing sources such as the Manhattan Institute and the SPLC-designated hate group Do No Harm for its putative data.
Throughout, the report insinuates that providers of transgender care are committing fraud by their mere participation in Medicare and Medicaid, universal necessities in U.S. society. It suggests that medical groups are engaging in a conspiracy by sharing guidance on navigating the intricacies of filing for insurance reimbursement, neglecting that such practices are routine for thousands of other treatments. Though President Trump and his administration are consumed by self-interest and corruption—from insider trading to attempting to create a slush fund for allies—their report nonetheless seeks to demonize doctors as profiteers.
A New York doctor who treats transgender patients and who spoke with Important Context on the condition of anonymity to protect their practice, noted that negotiating with insurance companies is just a fact of American healthcare. They dismissed the idea that doctors were profiteering off of treating transgender patients, stating that the administration was “spinning information and making it sound terrible.”
“If you wanted to scam the healthcare system, there’s a lot of easier ways,” the doctor said, noting that the transgender population is “massively underserved” and faces disproportionate economic hardship.
While gender-affirming care has been shown to be lifesaving, transgender Americans do indeed suffer higher rates of homelessness, suicidality, and economic hardship tied to social stigmas. The doctor noted that patients do not pursue gender-affirming treatment unless they really need it.
The HHS report repeats a favorite right-wing trope, popularized by the SPLC-designated anti-queer hate group Alliance Defending Freedom, that medical care for transgender people demands “novel” lifelong treatment. It does not note that many dozens of conditions require ongoing treatment throughout a patient’s life, including high blood pressure, thyroid disorders, diabetes, heart disease, gout, perimenopause, Crohn’s disease, high cholesterol, asthma, hemophilia, HIV, epilepsy, eosinophilic esophagitis, glaucoma, ADHD, immunosuppressants, organ transplant treatments and estrogen treatment for cis women.
It repeatedly invokes the fallacy of widespread gender-affirming surgery among young people, another right-wing trope, when in fact such surgery is exceedingly rare. To support its myth of predatory doctors, it devotes a chapter to “Captive Patients,” as if young trans people and their parents have no voice in their own medical care.
What little purported substantiation the “Wolves” report offers comes from a small, closed and circular universe of right-wing sources: a “landmark” lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who has faced allegations of corruption and is now running for Senate; cases filed by the Trump administration’s DOJ; stories from right-wing journalists for The Daily Wire and The Daily Caller; the writings of a putative whistleblower aligned with the religious right. It cites supposed insurance figures assembled by a group, Stop the Harm, an affiliate of billionaire-funded Do No Harm, whose methodology page reflects an explicit anti-trans bias—asserting, against medical evidence, that gender-affirming care is “not based in well-established science”—and whose work has been criticized for inflating numbers to further its agenda.
This is the second report HHS has published attacking gender-affirming care. The first was issued in spring 2025, shortly after Trump ordered the end of treatment for young people in an inflammatory executive order that repeatedly invoked the term “mutilation.” The report was then revised in November of that year to include the author’s names, which were originally withheld.
The revised version of more than 400 pages was highly criticized for its tendentious use of data, broad misrepresentations and promotion of conversion therapy. (The url to the 2025 document now redirects to the new report. The 2025 report is still available as a pdf archived on that page.)
‘Nobody’s Going to Trust Anything Anymore’
Despite its political intentions, the 2025 HHS report employed dry, academic language. By contrast, its new report appears to escalate HHS’s attacks on the medical profession itself, beginning with its incendiary title and its use of “fraud” as a means to threaten providers.
According to the report’s conspiratorial picture of the medical profession, experts are “elites” motivated solely by profit. The American Psychological Association, the Endocrine Society and the American Academy of Pediatrics are all targeted with unsupported assertions of supposed malfeasance. Special bile is reserved for the nonprofit World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which has already been targeted by Trump’s FTC in an unprecedented lawsuit that distorts consumer protection law to challenge clinical guidelines and medical standards.
Several pages of derisive commentary are focused on former President Joe Biden, a favorite target of the president and his allies. Rewriting and erasing decades of history concerning gender-affirming care, the report describes Biden as having unilaterally imposed “gender ideology.” It attacks Biden for supporting equal rights and offers self-congratulatory messages about Trump’s campaign to eradicate trans people.
The New York doctor told Important Context that they were troubled by HHS putting out such a political document.
“As soon as you politicize any sort of healthcare it’s a really slippery slope,” they said. “You are … damaging trust in the institution, and you’re also … just making it so nobody’s going to trust anything anymore, which is kind of their whole point.”
Walker Bragman is an investigative journalist and co-founder of the Accountability Journalism Institute.
Billie Jean Sweeney is a news editor, press freedom advocate and trans woman.
