Harvard profs sue Trump administration over deletion of LGBT medical research
Two professors at Harvard Medical School recently filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration for taking down research related to 'gender identity.'
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts on March 12 and alleges that the administration violated the professors’ First Amendment rights.
Two professors at Harvard Medical School recently filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration for taking down research related to “gender identity.”
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts on March 12 and alleges that the administration violated the professors’ First Amendment rights.
The article in question, co-authored by Harvard professors Celeste Royce and Gordon Schiff, was published on a website that is operated by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), a sub-agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), as reported by Reuters.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration directed AHRQ to remove articles on government websites that promote gender ideology. According to Dr. Patrick Romano, an official with AHRQ, the agency was told to “[t]ake down all outward facing media (websites, social media accounts etc.) that promote or inculcate gender ideology.”
Royce and Schiff admit in their lawsuit that the deleted article contained references to LGBT-based health care. Romano clarified to the Harvard professors that it therefore ran afoul of the government directive.
“Based on guidance provided to AHRQ staff, this instruction … was interpreted to include anything with the words ‘transgender,’ ‘nonbinary,’ or ‘gender identity,’” Romano wrote to the HMS professors in February, according to the lawsuit. “The phrase ‘LGBTQ’ is problematic because it includes that letter T for ‘transgender.’”
The lawsuit goes on to explain that the two professors were told they could re-upload their article to the AHRQ-run website if they removed the sections that discuss LGBT topics and transgenderism.
Specifically, they were informed on Feb. 6 by email “that AHRQ could republish censored versions of their pieces” on the condition that references to “transgender” and “LGBTQ” populations are removed.
Shortly after entering office, President Trump issued an executive order to crack down on gender ideology in the federal government.
The order defined “gender ideology” as the concept that “replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity, permitting the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa, and requiring all institutions of society to regard this false claim as true.”
Campus Reform has contacted Harvard University, Professor Celeste Royce and Professor Gordon Schiff for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
