{"id":313392,"date":"2026-02-27T18:03:11","date_gmt":"2026-02-27T18:03:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/313392\/"},"modified":"2026-02-27T18:03:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-27T18:03:11","slug":"science-of-sex-and-gender-being-misrepresented-by-trump-officials-experts-warn-us-healthcare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/313392\/","title":{"rendered":"Science of sex and gender being misrepresented by Trump officials, experts warn | US healthcare"},"content":{"rendered":"

As more health systems end gender-affirming care for patients amid a crackdown from the Trump administration<\/a>, scientists and advocates say the science of sex and gender is being misrepresented \u2013 and will have major repercussions for the healthcare for all Americans.<\/p>\n

Trump officials \u201cdon\u2019t actually understand the science at all\u201d, said Jey McCreight, who is the founder of Beyond X&Y and has a doctoral degree in human genomics. McCreight, who uses they\/them pronouns, added that using misinformation to limit who can seek healthcare is a warning for all patients.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese attacks are fundamentally coming from a broader attempt to dismantle science and expertise and truth,\u201d they said.<\/p>\n

Jess McLaughlin, an assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of Alaska Anchorage, who also uses they\/them pronouns, said: \u201cThese oversimplified understandings of the biology of sex are being used to back up transgender legislation and federal policy.\u201d<\/p>\n

They said: \u201cThe science is being misrepresented in such a way to hurt people.\u201d<\/p>\n

The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is finalizing a new rule<\/a> that would block Medicaid and Medicare payments to any health system providing gender-affirming care to patients under the age of 18, including medications such as puberty blockers and hormones; the public comment period for the new policy ended last week. The HHS would also bar federal programs, such as Medicaid and Chip, from covering the care.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why major clinics \u2013 including Mount Sinai<\/a>, NYU Langone, Mary Bridge Children\u2019s Hospital<\/a> in Tacoma, and University of Utah Health<\/a> \u2013 say they have ended their pediatric gender-affirming care programs, sharply curtailing the ability of trans children to access appropriate care across the US.<\/p>\n

Care for adults has also come under fire. The Trump administration announced<\/a> last week it would stop offering gender-affirming healthcare to trans people in correctional facilities. Trans people in prisons will not have access to clothing or toiletries determined not to align with their gender; anyone on hormones will be forced to taper off of them. Gender identity is \u201cdisconnected from biological reality and sex\u201d and \u201cdoes not provide a meaningful basis for identification\u201d, the new policy claims. The policy refers to \u201csex trait modification surgery\u201d instead of \u201cgender-affirming care\u201d, banning even non-surgical decisions like hair removal and voice modification.<\/p>\n

Scientists have also said that limiting healthcare based on distorted science could also set a path for restricting other forms of care, like abortion and vaccines, which have also come under fire by the Trump administration.<\/p>\n

The administration is \u201cnot just attacking trans people, it\u2019s attacking women\u2019s rights, bodily autonomy around abortion, disabled people, autistic people\u201d, McCreight said. \u201cIt\u2019s a larger movement to try to make people conform to what\u2019s seen as an ideal, but that ideal really comes from white Christian nationalism, not scientific reality.\u201d<\/p>\n

The HHS order<\/a> referred to gender-affirming care as \u201csex-rejecting procedures\u201d, a phrase that appears to have originated<\/a> with a conservative religious group in April 2025. That rhetoric implies \u201ca very strict set of characteristics that don\u2019t change\u201d, McLaughlin said, \u201cwhich is just not true\u201d.<\/p>\n

The World Health Organization warns against<\/a> conflating gender with sex, which is usually defined by \u201cphysical and physiological features\u201d like chromosomes, gene expression, hormones, and anatomy.<\/p>\n

The administration has had several stumbles in its attempt to define sex in order to restrict gender-affirming care.<\/p>\n

One of Trump\u2019s executive orders on his first day of his second term in office targeted<\/a> \u201cgender ideology extremism\u201d and claimed that biological sex is \u201cimmutable\u201d, with males and females determined by small and large reproductive cells that are present \u201cat conception\u201d.<\/p>\n

Those claims are flawed in several ways. When eggs are first fertilized by sperm, they are single-celled \u2013 which means it\u2019s impossible for them to have separate reproductive cells of their own. The cells that later become eggs begin to form months later in the third trimester, but they finish developing at puberty and then ovulation. Sperm only develop in puberty.<\/p>\n

The executive order did not mention intersex people, who have natural variations in chromosomes and anatomy.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the core things that we\u2019re running up against is: what on earth are we even talking about with \u2018sex\u2019? Do we mean chromosomes? Because that doesn\u2019t often match,\u201d McLaughlin said. \u201cMost people actually have no idea what their sex chromosomes are.\u201d<\/p>\n

While most people with XX chromosomes are female and XY chromosomes are male, there are also XX males, XY females, different combinations like XXY, and people who have certain sex chromosomes in some cells and another set in others. \u201cBiology never really operates in simple binaries,\u201d McCreight said. \u201cPeople have way more genetic variation than you would expect.\u201d<\/p>\n

Chromosomes give the body directions for how to develop and which traits to develop, McLaughlin said, adding: \u201cJust like handing actors a script is the starting point, what you actually see on stage might be very different at the end of the day, because there\u2019s all these other additional mechanisms that regulate and translate and interpret that genetic information.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then there are the medications that change a person\u2019s appearance, including hormones. \u201cSo much of the pushback to trans rights right now is really focused on \u2018you can tell what sex somebody is by looking at them.\u2019 But this really quickly breaks down because we\u2019re using traits that can be changed,\u201d McLaughlin said.<\/p>\n

During the HHS announcement blocking gender-affirming care, Dr Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, spoke about trans youth getting phalloplasty for $150,000. But McCreight dug into the research and couldn\u2019t find a single example of a patient under the age of 18 getting the procedure. They also found that the vast majority of breast reductions and augmentations happen among cisgender teens. Yet for the trans teens who need surgery, it is proven to be lifesaving, McCreight said. Taking away this care \u201cwill result in trans kids at the very least being more stressed and having more mental illness, but at worst, possibly dying\u201d, they said.<\/p>\n

Healthcare providers may also fall prey to misinformation about sex and gender, creating additional hurdles for trans health. \u201cYou can get care that either is not as effective as it could be or even harmful,\u201d McLaughlin said.<\/p>\n

Trans people have already faced challenges accessing appropriate healthcare, both for gender affirmation and generally. \u201cYou hear a lot about trans broken arm syndrome, where you go in for something that\u2019s really obvious like \u2018I broke my arm\u2019, and people will immediately try to be like, \u2018Well, maybe it\u2019s because you\u2019re trans,\u2019\u201d McLaughlin said.<\/p>\n

Misconceptions about biology affect everyone, not just trans people. Cisgender men in the Veterans Affairs system have reported difficulty<\/a> getting treatment for breast cancer because of the new HHS rules.<\/p>\n

The Trump administration is also weighing new restrictions on abortion medications, though they\u2019ve punted the issue until after the midterm elections. \u201cEven cis people should be afraid \u2013 what does this mean for their healthcare when you have politicians who don\u2019t understand science that are regulating these sorts of things?\u201d McCreight said.<\/p>\n

\u201cRepublicans, they\u2019re dismantling scientific research as a whole,\u201d McCreight added. \u201cIt\u2019s all about destroying expertise. Because if you can\u2019t get good information, they can basically put whatever propaganda they want out there, and we see that with RFK attacking vaccines and all sorts of other unscientific nonsense.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As more health systems end gender-affirming care for patients amid a crackdown from the Trump administration, scientists and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":313393,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[163,521,85,46],"class_list":{"0":"post-313392","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-healthcare","10":"tag-il","11":"tag-israel"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=313392"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/313392\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/313393"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=313392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=313392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=313392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}