the federal government published a study arguing that supporting us makes you violent

via The Guardian and Erin in the Morning, with the report itself published by the HHS Office of Population Affairs.

what hhs published

The Department of Health and Human Services has published a paper called "Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology?"

Its answer is yes. Its argument is that if you agree with what the American Psychological Association says about trans healthcare, you are statistically more likely to be an authoritarian who will excuse political violence. Its evidence is a survey of 1,208 people.

We are going to walk through how it got there, because the how is the story.

how they built the ruler

To measure your beliefs about trans healthcare, the authors needed a scale. There was not one that gave them what they wanted, so they built one and named it the Clinical Gender Affirmation Scale. It has never been validated. Andrew Flores, who studies this for a living, told Erin in the Morning what that means in plain English: "These are not scales that have ever been validated. They just made them up."

Then they needed to measure your appetite for political violence. They asked about violence against conservative targets. They did not ask about the other direction. If you only count the punches thrown one way, you will find that one side throws all the punches, and you can print that as a finding.

Then they needed to measure authoritarianism, and what the questions largely measured was whether you vote Democratic.

it was never peer reviewed

The paper was not peer reviewed. It was not published in a journal. There is no documented institutional review board sign-off. The underlying survey data and response numbers are not in it. The author list runs through Rutgers, the Network Contagion Research Institute and the Manhattan Institute, which is a set of addresses, not a discipline.

Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz, an epidemiologist at the University of Sydney, called it "a very poorly done piece of research" and then went further: "nakedly political." He added, "It was probably the most obviously political study that I've come across."

Daniel Aaron, a law professor at the University of Utah, called it "quite an abnormal document" and raised the part with teeth. Federal law requires peer review for influential scientific information the government puts its name on. He wants to know why HHS is publishing political science at all.

Craig Konnoth of the University of Virginia named the target, and it is bigger than us: "a broadside attack on the scientific establishment."

what it is really for

That is the thing to hold onto. This paper is not really about whether trans people are dangerous. It is a demonstration that the federal government can now generate a scientific-looking document that says whatever it needs said, put the HHS seal on it, and skip every step that used to make a document mean something. We are the test case because we are the group it costs least to test on. The method does not stay in the test case.

And it is not academic. The same department, in the same season, has moved to strip gender-affirming care out of Medicaid, out of federal employee insurance and out of hospitals that take federal money. This paper is the footnote those moves will cite.

Somebody at a federal agency sat down, invented a ruler, measured us with it, and published the number. The ruler was made up. The number is now a citation. That is how this works now.