Most political violence in America is perpetrated by individuals with right-wing beliefs, but the right is not the focus of the new report on the subject from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The document instead looks exclusively to the left—specifically to transgender people and their allies.
Released Wednesday, “Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology?” attempts to tie recognition of transgender people and support for their health care needs to “authoritarianism and willingness to justify political violence.”
Previous administrations have focused on right-wing extremism as a threat to national security, but the Trump White House has different priorities. The president has courted the far-right, once telling the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” and one of his first actions upon returning to office was pardoning hundreds of his supporters who had been convicted of crimes related to the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Trump’s DOJ has also entered into questionable legal settlements with the president and his allies while targeting colleges, media outlets, and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which now faces federal money laundering and wire fraud charges related to its infiltration of far-right groups.
“Where the Clinic Meets the Movement” claims that “gender ideology…functions as a content package for [left-wing authoritarianism],” providing it “ideological fuel” by identifying oppressor and oppressed classes, seeking “top down censorship and control over those who do not conform to its dictates,” and by “aspiring to overturn the status quo with respect to sex and family.”
Transgender Americans have become a favorite target of the political right, facing legislative, legal, and rhetorical attacks, and they are significantly more likely to be victims of violent crime than perpetrators. Some experts, including two former presidents of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, have warned that a genocide against them is underway in the U.S.
The HHS report calls this position a “catastrophizing belief.”
As its deployment of the term “gender ideology” suggests, the report dismisses the medical consensus supporting transgender identities and gender-affirming care. Groups like the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Psychological Association are targeted by the authors, who claim they are ideological—adherents of “minority stress theory,” which holds that minority groups face oppression that impacts their health and well-being.
“Where the Clinic Meets the Movement” is the second report targeting transgender Americans to come out of HHS this month. Ten days before it was published, another report claimed that gender-affirming care was a hotbed of medical abuse and fraud by doctors. The authors of that first paper included the president of an SPLC-designated anti-LGBTQIA+ hate group and a doctor who had previously edited a book on identifying demonic possession.
The latest report was also authored primarily by individuals affiliated with right-leaning groups. Three are with the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), a think tank affiliated with Rutgers University that purports to track violent extremism and mis- and disinformation on social media. Joel Finkelstein, who previously worked at the pro-Israel advocacy group Anti-Defamation League, is the group’s chief scientific officer and co-founder. Rutgers PhD student Danit Finkelstein is also a co-founder while Ohad Fedida is a research fellow. Rutgers psychology professor Lee Jussim has been part of the group’s leadership team.
Like the ADL, NCRI has positioned itself against the ascendant forces of the political left, largely over the issue of Israel. A September 2025 report from the group claimed that the Democratic Socialists of America—an organization with over 100,000 members—had “been overtaken by a radical ‘anti-Zionist’ resolution that seeks to delegitimize Judaism’s historical and religious connection to Israel while imposing exclusionary and discriminatory membership conditions.”
The report warned that the group’s “mainstreaming of rhetorical support for organizations or movements tied to armed action raises counterterrorism and counter-extremism concerns if discourse translates into material support networks.” In February, an NCRI report claimed DSA “acts as an unregistered foreign agent inside the United States.”
A search of the group’s website for terms “transgender” and “LGBT” turns up no results—no reports on misinformation targeting the LGBTQIA+ community.
Although the group does not disclose its donors, Important Context was able to identify several grants to NCRI, including $300,000 from the Israel on Campus Coalition between July 2021 and June 2022 and $19,000 from right-wing billionaire megafunder Charles Koch in 2021.
The other group represented in “Where the Clinic Meets the Movement” is the Manhattan Institute, a well-funded far-right think tank that is known for its affiliation with right-wing activist Chris Rufo. The institute has been a wellspring of anti-trans misinformation. Colin Wright, who has a PhD in evolutionary biology, is a fellow with the group.
Wright is also an academic advisor to the Society for Evidence-based Gender Medicine. Both groups were identified in 2023 by the SPLC as being part of an anti-LGBTQIA+ pseudoscience network.
Jussim has also collaborated with the Manhattan Institute. He was one of the academics to sign onto the group’s call to “reform” academia by force, which was spearheaded by Rufo. The statement claimed that “The universities have capitulated to the radical left’s ‘long march through the institutions,’ which has converted them into laboratories of ideology, rather than institutions oriented toward truth.” It called on Donald Trump to “draft a new contract with the universities, which should be written into every grant, payment, loan, eligibility, and accreditation, and punishable by revocation of all public benefit.”
In his Substack post explaining his decision to sign the document, Jussim explained that while he did not agree with every statement the document made, he did agree with the reforms, either wholly or with some modification.
”I also signed on because I have seen no evidence that academia will reform itself to address the problems resulting from its overt politicization and evolution into an engine for the advancement of progressive values, policies, and worldviews,” he wrote.
The new HHS report has faced criticism for its methodology, which surveyed 1,208 participants about their views on transgender identities and gender-affirming care and whether they considered specific acts of political violence justified—like attacks on law enforcement and ICE or the killing of Charlie Kirk, the far-right political operative the administration has lionized since his death.
Epidemiologist Gideon Meyerowitz-Katz called the study “so nakedly political that it’s hard to infer any real meaning from the results” in a post for his “Health Nerd” blog.
“For one thing, the authors claim that their survey measured how much people agreed with “political violence”. But that’s obviously false—they asked whether people supported specific acts of left-wing violence,” he wrote. “There are plenty of forms of political violence that right-wing people generally endorse.”
Meyerowitz-Katz noted that the questions measured left-wing beliefs without any connection to authoritarian actions, adding “In my opinion, all the authors have done in this farce of a survey is measured political affiliation.”
“Had they asked, say, whether the attack on Paul Pelosi was justified, they probably would have seen markedly different responses from their participants,” Meyerowitz-Katz wrote. “Had they asked straightforward questions measuring adherence to authoritarianism, such as ‘should people who disagree with you be put in jail’, they might also have seen completely different answers. Instead, what we’ve got here is a garbled, useless set of questions that mostly tells us one thing: the Trump administration continues to support pseudoscience.”