A new study from the Trump administration is sending alarm bells through pro-democracy groups for its potential to fuel a crackdown on Americans who support LGBTQ+ rights — or anyone with left-leaning views. 

Last week, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released a study that reaches a dramatic conclusion: Those who support transgender people may be more likely to justify political violence. The study also claims that those who agree with statements like “all political conservatives are fools” or “anyone who opposes gay marriage must be homophobic” may also be more likely to support political violence. 

Experts have serious doubts about the study’s findings and major ethical objections to its methodology. They say that it builds on previous pseudoscience about trans people and, ultimately, they are concerned about how the Trump administration plans to use it. 

“I have rarely read a report that has come out of the government that is so clearly politically biased,” said Hanah Stiverson, director of policy at the Chamberlain Network, a pro-democracy nonprofit that fights political polarization. This report is clearly meant for political weaponization, she said.

This report is continuing the anti-trans campaign laid out by the Trump administration by moving the conversation beyond youth and sports, said Heron Greenesmith, a policy attorney who has researched anti-trans advocacy networks. It goes beyond past arguments by administration allies linking transgender people to increased capacity to violence, Greenesmith said: “It seeks to explicitly connect support for trans people to violence by actors on the left.”

The study, commissioned by HHS, was done by researchers with Rutgers University, as well as the conservative think tank Manhattan Institute and the Network Contagion Research Institute, a nonprofit studying extremism and online rhetoric from QAnon to the Democratic Socialists of America. 

None of the authors responded to The 19th’s multiple interview requests. HHS and Rutgers also did not respond to a request for comment. 

The HHS report notes that there is more work to be done, and “additional research questions will be addressed in subsequent analyses.” The authors shared their design on an open-source academic research site in June, hinting at directions of future reports and what else the government may use this research for. 

The study

The report released by HHS, titled “‘Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology?” analyzed the responses of 1,208 adults to questions about support for transgender people and other topics related to political violence and democracy.

The researchers considered the responses in terms of eight metrics. One was their own creation: the “Clinical Gender Affirmation Scale,” or CGAS, meant to measure support for trans people based on clinical guidelines from major medical groups. It asks respondents how much they agree with statements like “people should be supported in expressing their transgender identity” and whether using a trans person’s chosen name and pronouns is necessary. 

The other metrics the researchers looked at included left-wing authoritarianism — a concept that has been controversial for decades — the justification of political violence and anti-democratic attitudes. On left-wing authoritarianism, the questions gauged support for statements including: “America would be much better off if all of the rich people were at the bottom of the social ladder” or “to succeed, a workplace must ensure that its employees feel safe from criticism.” On political violence, it asked about opinions on high-profile assassination attempts, damaging the property of wealthy people and setting fire to ICE buildings. 

The authors of the study write that, based on their research, supporting trans people is linked to “left-wing ideological extremity that independently predicts support for coercive and violent political action.” 

“Together, these findings support the paper’s core claim: gender ideology may function as an ideological accelerant, telling left-wing authoritarian psychology who the enemy is, why the situation is urgent and — in those already disposed toward force — that violence is legitimate,” the study authors write. 

Ethical and methodological concerns

Experts are baffled by such far-reaching conclusions.

“Correlation is not causation. The authors jump to a lot of implications based on a correlation,” said Jami Taylor, a professor of political science and public administration at the University of Toledo. “It kind of looks like a fishing expedition to me.” 

Nuance is missing throughout the research, Taylor said, including on respondents’ beliefs that could impact their views of transgender people, like where they stand on equal rights, social norms and traditional gender roles. She also took issue with the sampling techniques and said that the findings couldn’t be extrapolated to the general population.

“If I was on the review board for the institution, I would have certainly raised some concerns about asking people about their attitudes on political assassination, particularly of the president of the United States. To me, it is pretty unethical,” Taylor said. In her view, asking about opinions on assassination attempts — including on President Donald Trump — is unethical because it invokes harm and can also put the respondents at risk of being targeted by the administration. 

Stiverson, from the Chamberlain Network, found the HHS report’s conclusion — and the research that led to it — both unethical and misleading. 

“It is, from my reading, misrepresenting data and creating a false equivalency,” Stiverson said. Affirming a marginalized group does not equal oppression, she said. And, she added, the study is built on a fundamental flaw: It misuses the term “authoritarianism.”

Stiverson, a scholar of fascist movements in the United States who has studied authoritarianism and extremism, said authoritarianism requires a focus on concentrating power, an almost blind adherence to that power and a rejection of anything outside the norms of society. That’s not what the study is asking about, though, she said. 

She believes left-wing authoritarianism exists, but she doesn’t think it is adequately defined in this research — and that makes the premise flawed. 

Left-wing extremism is generally well-documented, but the concept of left-wing authoritarianism is controversial. At least one study has argued that scales like the one used in the HHS report actually just measure rebelliousness, sadism or political leanings  — not authoritarianism. 

“What they’re actually talking about is a radicalization towards political violence. Authoritarianism is more nuanced than that,” Stiverson said. 

Experts had other issues with the study; some called the questions biased and poorly crafted. Greenesmith pointed out controversial statements within the report that were not adequately cited, such as the assertion that the killing of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk in 2025 — which respondents were asked if they viewed as justified — is “a case widely covered and publicly perceived as connected to gender ideology.” 

Researchers had more questions: How was the study funded? Was it peer reviewed? Did the authors get approval from the Institutional Review Board, which provides ethical and regulatory oversight of research involving human subjects? 

The 19th reached out to Rutgers with these questions and has not yet heard back. 

The politics

“I would call it pseudo-science,” said Wendy Via, cofounder and CEO of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, a nonprofit that opposes far-right movements. “They commissioned a report to support the conclusion they had already drawn, which is that transgender people or people who support transgender people are more likely to be violent.”

The nonprofit has released a full report detailing its issues with the study, saying it lacks independent validation or peer review for the CGAS scale and that it appears to be built with bias against gender-affirming care for trans people.

This study fits into a larger effort by the Trump administration to target anyone seen as anti-American or who has nontraditional views on gender, Via said. The architects of Project 2025, authored by the conservative Heritage Foundation, have urged the government to monitor and label transgender people — and those close to them — as terrorists. She sees this new study as a stepping stone toward that goal. 

“When I first saw this report, the first thing I thought was that the administration is trying to build its case to finally designate ‘transgender ideology’ as a category of domestic terrorism,” Via said. 

There is actually an abundance of evidence that attitudes about gender are tied to violent extremism — but that it’s misogyny, not acceptance of trans people, that fuels hateful violence. Experts like Cynthia Miller-Idriss at American University have pushed for the government to take misogynistic violence seriously as a precursor to mass violence and extremism, but instead the White House has emphasized left-wing violence, which is less prevalent than that motivated by right-wing beliefs. Misogyny exists everywhere, but is more in line with conservative values around patriarchy and gender roles. In her book released last year, Miller-Idriss documented how hateful rhetoric about how LGBTQ+ communities go against the “natural order” is prevalent in radicalization pathways, particularly among the manosphere. 

Last year, a White House memo detailed viewpoints that the government sees as common recurrent motivations for violence and domestic terrorism and included “extremism on migration, race and gender” and “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion and morality.” 

This year, in the U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy unveiled by the White House, the government said that it would “prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-America, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”

And more recently, Donald Trump Jr. — who does not work in the administration but who has a following on the right — put it more bluntly: “The radical transgender movement is per capita the most violent domestic terror threat if not in America, probably the entire world.”

All of this rhetoric raises fears that trans people, or anyone who supports them, could be labeled as anti-democratic, violent or prone to terrorism and pursued by federal authorities.

The transgender community is one of the most marginalized and victimized in America, Via said. Trans people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to be victims of violent crime, according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law. Over and over again, experts have debunked the claim of widespread violent threats coming from trans people.

“They continue to target this community as if it is the biggest threat this nation faces, and on its face it isn’t. But they do it because they can demonize the community and use them as a weapon to scare and threaten people into accepting a restriction of rights that will not end with trans people,” Via said. 

The authors

The Rutgers scholars who worked on the study are part of the university’s ​​Social Perception Lab, which is directed by psychology professor Lee Jussim. On Substack, he has written on topics including “there’s little or no anti-Black discrimination today” and “no evidence for workplace sex discrimination.” 

Several researchers who produced the study also work with the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), which has previously studied what it describes as a growing “assassination culture” within “the extreme left” in the United States. The nonprofit, founded in 2018, has produced reports about extremism across the political spectrum, including how the far-right conspiracy theory QAnon poses a threat to democracy. More recent work includes reports like “Democratic Socialists Of America: Policy Advocacy And Narrative Convergence With Hostile Foreign States,” “Beijing’s Dark Money Pipeline Into U.S. Higher Education,” and “Permission to Kill: How Candace Owens Built a Digital Assassination Culture Targeting Erika Kirk.” NCRI’s research on foreign gifts to universities has been cited by Congress.

The conservative Manhattan Institute has a track record of criticizing medical authorities on gender-affirming care, like the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) and the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). The study claims that these medical groups are “ideologically structured” in their treatment of and support of trans people, and that that structure “can arm authoritarian psychology.”

Of the five authors, one declined to be interviewed, one was traveling and unable to comment, and the other three did not reply to emailed interview requests.

The country’s most prominent medical groups have been under considerable pressure from the Trump administration and Republican attorneys general over healthcare for trans youth. The government sued WPATH this summer and has made sweeping demands for internal communications from other medical groups that endorse gender-affirming care.

In a statement, WPATH criticized the new report as a “blatant attempt to villainize transgender and gender-diverse Americans” and said that “healthcare decisions should remain between the patient and their physician, free from fear of political or governmental interference.” 

Ultimately, experts see this report from HHS as a political tool. What remains to be seen is how it will be used. 

“I don’t doubt that they will try to act on this in some way,” Via said.

The authors note that the study has several limitations; namely, the causational direction of their findings: whether support for trans people apparently influences left-wing authoritarianism or vice versa. 

The HHS report was preregistered through Open Science Framework, a platform where researchers can share their methodology and experimental plans to increase transparency and eliminate bias. The 19th viewed the linked submission, which listed some different co-authors and claimed no institutional affiliation. 

Included there was a longer survey draft with questions beyond what was described in the HHS report, including whether the U.S. government is fascist and how likely a transgender person is to die by suicide if their gender isn’t affirmed. The 19th was unable to confirm whether this was the final survey shared with respondents.

“I think once this has more time to percolate in the scientific, academic spaces, it’s going to be torn apart,” Stiverson said.

A second study is being designed to address some of these limitations, the authors said in their report. The “experimental design” will “test whether exposure to CGAS-consistent content produces the patterns predicted by the present theory,” they write.

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