More Transgender-Specific Grants to Children’s Hospitals and Universities

Note: This is an updated version of the 2023 report. Since the first report was published, our researchers have identified an additional $41 million in transgender-specific grants for a total of $145 million. The dataset has been updated accordingly.

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As the number of children identifying themselves as transgender rose astronomically, the Biden administration assured Americans that it was both safe and normal for kids to undergo medical “transition” procedures. For example, former Assistant Secretary for Health Admiral Rachel Levine took to social media to say that “gender-affirming care is medically necessary, safe, and effective for trans and non-binary youth” and called chemical and surgical transitioning a “life-saving” and “critical tool” for pediatricians.

Behind the scenes, though, the Biden administration wasn’t so sure that the science was as settled as it claimed. While telling the world that the sudden spike in transgender youths and adults was safe and natural, the Biden administration poured an obscene amount of money into researching the devastating mental and physical health consequences that mysteriously plague people who have undergone “gender-affirming care.”

The Method

According to a keyword search of USASpending.gov, a database of federal expenditures, the Biden administration set aside or spent over $1.6 billion since the start of fiscal year 2021 for grants, contracts, direct payments, and loans to programs that use the keyword “transgender” in their description, name, or other filing information.

However, most of these payments were not allocated specifically for transgender-related work and included “transgender” only as part of a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statement in the description. The $1.6 billion total is a testament to the ascendant power of DEI in government departments under the Biden administration (the combined total from 2008 to 2020 was just $184 million), but the $1.6 billion total isn’t particularly useful for determining how much the Biden administration actually spent on transgenderism. Extracting useful data required reviewing each individual grant and contract description. Only grants and contracts initiated in 2021 or later were considered.

What We Found

To isolate generic DEI statements from trans-specific spending, Capital Research Center combed through over 600 individual federal grants and contracts featuring keywords and phrases like “transgender” or “gender-affirming” and identified over $145 million in payments or obligations to initiatives mostly or exclusively promoting, subsidizing, or studying transgenderism.

Despite the Biden administration’s assurances that gender-affirming care was safe enough to perform on children, most of this money was awarded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to commission medical research on a variety of horrific mental and physical health conditions that plague transgender people both before and after transitioning. Some of these studies even examined catastrophic side effects of the hormonal and surgical transition procedures that the administration insisted were supported by overwhelming medical consensus.

In addition, many grants of a less sinister but equally wasteful nature put the federal government’s proclivity for downright absurd spending on full display.

For a full list of the grants and contracts identified by our research, see the updated source spreadsheet, which includes links to original source documents, updated dollar amounts, and minor corrections from the original 2023 printing of this report.

Funding the Very-Much-Not-Settled Science

The Biden administration directed millions of dollars toward researching the health problems that plague transgender adults.

A combined $956,186 for example, was obligated to the Medical College of Wisconsin and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center for studies examining how to manage the elevated rates of breast cancer in “transfeminine” people taking estrogen for long periods of time, while $1.1 million was awarded to UC San Diego (by the Department of Defense) to study their risk of prostate cancer. A further $2 million was given to the University of Minnesota just to develop a process to recruit transgender patients for future hypothetical cancer studies, since it’s difficult to obtain a large enough sample size.

Cancer isn’t the only risk being studied.

The Boston Medical Center was awarded $696,928 to study cardiovascular health problems in transgender people and how hormone treatments affect long-term heart health. Indiana University at Bloomington was awarded $3.1 million to study why transwomen have an increased risk of asthma. Michigan State University was pledged another $1.7 million to develop a framework for “modeling resilience as a multidimensional protective factor for transgender health disparities.”

Alongside these grants are many more to study and treat the unusually high rates of alcoholism, domestic violence, substance abuse, and mental health issues suffered by transgender adults.

The Trans HIV Epidemic

Millions were also spent on programs to study, treat, and reduce the staggering rates of HIV/AIDS infection in transgender people. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 42 percent of transgender women surveyed in seven major U.S. cities in 2021 were HIV positive. That same year, the CDC estimated that 1.2 million total Americans (0.36 percent of the general population) were HIV positive. This indicates transgender people (at least in the seven cities) experience HIV at a rate over 100 times higher than the rest of America.

Leaving no stone unturned (and no dollar unspent) the government has funded expensive studies at a long roster of universities to examine this issue from virtually every angle.

For example, Emory University was obligated $344,632 to study why pumping biological males with estrogen as part of gender-affirming hormone therapy makes their rectal mucus more susceptible to HIV infection. On the other side of that coin, the University of Alabama at Birmingham received $408,375 to study why pumping biological women with testosterone makes their vaginal and cervical tissue much more susceptible to severe tearing and HIV infection.

Another $5.2 million was awarded to John Hopkins University to create a nationwide study of transwomen to get a more accurate estimate of their “disproportionately” high the rate of HIV infection. The Research Foundation for Mental Hygiene, meanwhile, received $1.1 million to test the efficacy of an “evidence-based, trauma-informed HIV prevention” program for transwomen of color that claimed to reduce HIV infection rates by mitigating the effects of “intersectional stigma.”

Perhaps one of the largest grants, though, was a $7.7 million grant to UCLA to develop an app to promote sexual health and HIV testing specifically among young transwomen.

“But what about an app to help promote HIV testing to transmen?” you might ask. Fear not, Columbia University was obligated $733,466 from the Biden administration for MyPeeps Mobile, a different app which was designed just for young transgender men.

Eliminating HIV is an admirable goal, and the transgender community is undoubtedly a good place to start in that work, but the previous administration’s policy of vigorously promoting gender-affirming care seems to have been directly at odds with a goal taxpayers are spending billions of dollars to reach.

Experimental Medicine Targeting Children

A bombshell study by the American Medical Association published in 2023 revealed that an estimated 3,600 minors underwent gender-affirming surgeries in the U.S. 2016 to 2023. It directly refuted the claims of transgender activists that such procedures were never performed on children. The Biden administration, for its part, had long acknowledged that these procedures were being performed on children, if only through its grantmaking. At least $19 million of the trans-specific grants that our research discovered paid for the promotion and research of transgenderism among children and young adults.

In August 2022, months before former President Biden publicly endorsed hormone replacement therapy as safe for minors, HHS pledged $1.7 million to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center to study “thrombosis risk in transgender adolescents and young adults starting gender-affirming hormone therapy.” The hospital said the risk of thrombosis, or severe blood clots, is elevated when a young person is taking gender-affirming hormone treatment, particularly if they are being administered estrogen. A similar $500,000 study at Yale studied the “cardiometabolic effects of gender-affirming hormone therapy in transgender adolescents” and hypothesized that “altered hormonal milieu is the major driver of increased cardiometabolic risk in transgender youth.”

There was also a great deal of research into the mental health problems that transitioned children face.

A $136,000 HHS grant to Princeton examined the “psychological consequences of medical transition in transgender youth.” Princeton acknowledged that “transgender youth experience higher levels of mental illness” and conceded that there is currently not enough evidence to support the idea that gender-affirming care is psychologically beneficial for children. As the grant says:

Legislators throughout the US have recently introduced bills that would ban transgender youth from accessing puberty suppression and hormone therapy, asserting that these interventions are not psychologically beneficial. Five studies to date have longitudinally examined the relationship between one or both of these interventions and mental health in transgender youth. However, these studies have had relatively small samples, none have been able to isolate the effects of endocrine interventions, none have included a cisgender comparison group, and none have examined the mechanisms by which endocrine interventions might improve mental health. [capitalization adjusted for readability]

In other words, according to Princeton, no satisfactory evidence suggests gender-affirming care confers a psychological benefit to kids and young people. Despite this, Princeton University Health services continues to offer gender-affirming hormones and surgeries to students.

The administration also generously awarded $3 million to Nationwide Children’s Hospital to examine the long-term negative mental health consequences of supposedly reversible pubertal hormone blockers, admitting that “the overall impacts of [gonadotropin releasing hormone antagonists] treatment have not been systematically studied.”

The study was first approved for funding by the HHS in July 2021, but in October 2022, President Biden called legislation proposing to ban the use of puberty blockers on transgender minors ”outrageous” and “immoral,” while his administration sued Tennessee to prevent the state from enacting such a law.

“Grooming”

Other grants even focused on supporting behavior that many in right-leaning political circles have dubbed “grooming,” though the use of the term is considered highly controversial. The Seattle Children’s Hospital, for example, was awarded $285,239 to develop a telehealth clinic for “gender diverse youth” and another $456,997 for programs to help promote healthy sexual relationships among “transgender and gender expansive youth.”

One particularly troubling $158,705 grant to the University of Wisconsin funded a study to determine how social media influencers can encourage kids to explore their gender identity without their parents’ knowledge. Another $439,999 was paid to the University of Nebraska to create an experimental “online mentoring program” in which transgender children could be paired up with a transgender “adult mentor” to discuss, among other things, “self-harm, alcohol and drug-use, [and] sexual risk-taking.”

One of the largest, a $3.3 million grant to the Boston Children’s Hospital that has already been widely reported, commissioned an “interactive educational digital platform” designed for transgender children to explore.

Another grant, awarded to a mysteriously redacted recipient in New Jersey, pledged $138,000 to a study of “social preferences among transgender, gender nonconforming, and gender typical children.” Only HHS and the undisclosed recipient know what that means.

A Sprinkling of Government Waste

Besides the truly sinister targeting of children and horrifying medical experiments, much of the transgender-specific spending our research identified is just hilariously wasteful.

The Center for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Art & Culture was obligated a total of $100,000 for its “Queer arts festival,” and another $150,000 from a COVID-19 relief grant.

The YR Gaitonde Medical Educational and Research Foundation in India received nearly $50,000 from the Department of State “to sensitize employees in Hyderabad and Chennai toward transgender persons in their workforce.”

The Federation of Sexual and Gender Minorities, Nepal received $2,315 to provide English classes for “professional transgender women makeup entrepreneurs.”

The Memphis Brooks Museum of Art received $20,000 for an exhibition featuring “portraits of transgender people by contemporary photographer Mark Seliger.”

Another $10,000 was given to Oregon Arts Watch by the National Endowment for the Arts to “support the creation and publication of a series of written and photo essays featuring gender-nonconforming and transgender people.”

The Fundacion Grupo de Accion y Apoyo a Personas Trans received $125,000 to support “the rights and safety of transgender people” in Colombia, the Universidad de los Andes received $25,000 in federal funding and $47,000 total to raise awareness of transgenderism in the Colombian opera scene, and an unidentified “foreign awardee” received $10,000 in federal funding and $86,000 in total to promote the “insertion of trans people in Colombia.”

HSU Development was given a $1 million contract to build one single gender-neutral bathroom on the first floor of a government building. In fact, the Biden administration spent at least $3.8 million on gender-neutral bathrooms from 2021 to 2023.

Who Can You Trust?

Despite the assurances that the Biden administration, universities, children’s hospitals, and activists offered the public, the science was never settled on transgenderism. The institutions that promote gender-affirming care across the U.S. are the exclusive beneficiaries of a small government-funded industry that has been erected around treating and studying the catastrophic mental and physical health consequences that result from it. The universities that deluge impressionable students with gender theory, the hospitals that provide the surgeries and pills, and the activist groups and community centers that promote transgenderism to the world have all raked in enormous grants to fix the problems that they helped cause.

There is simply no way to trust “the science” or “the experts” on this issue any longer. It would be akin to trusting a tobacco company to report honestly on the negative side effects of cigarettes. This is particularly true since the leading scientists and experts in this field remained silent when the very administration that funded them voiced support for conclusions about the safety of transgenderism that are at odds with the basic premises of their ongoing government-funded research. Now that it is once again the official policy of the U.S. government that there are only two genders, it seems likely that the madness of government funding for transgenderism will be put to an end.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/more-transgender-specific-grants-to-childrens-hospitals-and-universities/