HHS Report Linking Transgender Support to Authoritarianism Draws Scrutiny Over Methods

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is facing questions over a federally commissioned report that associates support for transgender-affirming practices with “left-wing authoritarianism” and greater willingness to justify political violence.

Released on August 26, 2026, the 24-page report surveyed 1,208 U.S. adults and found statistical associations between endorsement of transgender-affirming positions, a measure of left-wing authoritarianism, and respondents’ views of six politically charged acts of violence.

The authors explicitly acknowledge that their study cannot establish that one set of beliefs causes another, a limitation that has become central to criticism of how HHS presented the findings.

What the HHS Study Found

The report, titled Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology?, was written by researchers affiliated with Rutgers University, the Manhattan Institute and the Network Contagion Research Institute. HHS describes it as a commissioned study.

Researchers recruited 1,305 adults through CloudResearch Connect and retained 1,208 after excluding 97 responses for reasons including failed attention or bot checks, unusually fast completion, duplicate IDs, and incomplete surveys.

About 55% of the final sample identified as or leaned Democratic, 27.2% Republican, and 15.1% independent without a partisan lean. About 1.1% identified as transgender or gender-nonconforming, according to the full HHS report.

The researchers created a five-item Clinical Gender Affirmation Scale, or CGAS. Among the propositions respondents rated were whether transgender people should be supported in expressing their identity, whether using chosen names and pronouns is necessary support, and whether parents should support children exploring their gender.

The authors said they derived those questions from guidance associated with the American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association, World Professional Association for Transgender Health, and American Academy of Pediatrics.

Higher CGAS scores were correlated with higher scores on a separate left-wing-authoritarianism scale. CGAS scores were also positively correlated with greater justification of six violent scenarios, with correlation coefficients ranging from 0.23 to 0.35. The authoritarianism measure produced stronger correlations, between 0.47 and 0.54.

Why Researchers Are Challenging the Conclusions

The study did not measure whether participants had committed, planned, or intended political violence.

Respondents instead rated how justified they considered acts including killing President Donald Trump, killing conservative activist Charlie Kirk, killing UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson, setting fire to Immigration and Customs Enforcement buildings, damaging wealthy people’s property, and violence against police.

Critics have questioned that selection because all six scenarios were framed around violence associated with left-wing political grievances, without parallel questions testing approval of violence associated with right-wing causes.

Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, an epidemiologist at the University of Sydney, told the Guardian that the design made the research politically one-sided and argued that different violence scenarios could have produced different relationships.

Legal scholars Daniel Aaron of the University of Utah and Craig Konnoth of the University of Virginia also questioned the report’s methodology and its publication through a federal health agency.

The report itself cautions against drawing a causal conclusion. Its authors state that transgender-affirming beliefs could influence authoritarian attitudes, authoritarian attitudes could influence those beliefs, or an unmeasured third factor could influence both. They say experimental research is needed.

Status as of September 8

As of September 8, 2026, HHS continued to host the report and describe its results as evidence of an association between “gender-affirming” norms, left-wing authoritarian attitudes and justification of political violence. Assistant Secretary for Health Admiral Brian Christine said HHS would continue researching those relationships in its official overview of the study.

The document was not published in a scientific journal before its federal release. Author Colin Wright told the Guardian that the researchers intended to submit it to a journal and said HHS may have released it sooner than expected after a draft leaked.

Federal peer-review requirements have also entered the debate. An Office of Management and Budget bulletin requires agencies to arrange peer review for government-disseminated scientific information deemed “influential,” meaning information expected to substantially affect important public policy or private decisions.

Whether the HHS study legally falls within that category has not been formally determined.

The Report Arrives During a Broader Policy Shift

The controversy comes as the Trump administration expands federal action against gender-affirming treatment for minors. On September 4, the Justice Department announced an agreement under which Mount Sinai Health System in New York will stop providing puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgical interventions to minors.

Mount Sinai denied the government’s allegations, and the Justice Department said there had been no determination of liability, according to the Justice Department announcement.

The researchers say they are designing a second, preregistered experiment intended to test causal direction. Until such work is completed and independently reviewed, the current report supports a statistical association within one survey, rather than evidence that supporting transgender people causes authoritarianism or political violence.