The Neglected Front in RFK Jr.’s War on Science
As trans healthcare is decimated no one is standing up for the integrity of the scientific process for these patients.
Opinion, by Evan Urquhart
A shoddy, hastily thrown together report, authored by activists and ideological allies and tasked with reaching a pre-ordained conclusion is dictating policy at Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services. The policies are based on the anti-science obsessions of the administration and will almost certainly result in harm to untold numbers of children. This may sound like a familiar story, but there’s a twist: Instead of vaccines, grant funding, or autism, this ideologically motivated anti-science push is targeting trans children—and therefore nobody is telling Americans the straight truth about it.
Let’s start with Kennedy’s HHS. To suggest that ideological biases and disdain for expertise are reshaping public health during Trump’s second term, or that this anti-science stance is detrimental to Americans’ well-being, is hardly controversial.
For example, when the administration falsely claimed that their review of the science had shown acetaminophen causes autism the declaration received a no-nonsense, science-forward treatment from just about every mainstream news organization, including ABC, NPR, CBS, USA Today, the New York Times, and many others. Outlets often used clear, unambiguous headlines for these stories. “Trump blames Tylenol for autism. Science doesn't back him up,” read NPR’s. If not in the headline, the message was conveyed with strong subheaders, such as “How President Trump ignored science about vaccines in his news conference,” from NYT. The stories clearly conveyed the divergence between the Trump administration’s declarations and evidence-backed public health advice.
Kennedy’s anti-vax crusade has been treated similarly. The primary media response to claims from HHS that they had reviewed the evidence on vaccines and found it lacking has been to raise the alarm at the public health emergency in the offing. “Instead of vaccines, RFK Jr. focuses on unconventional measles treatments, driving worries about misinformation.” stated a headline from a CNN story last March. A subhead from a story in the New York Times last week reads, “The American Academy of Pediatrics had called the department’s policies ‘irresponsible and purposefully misleading’ and joined a lawsuit against its vaccine policy.”
The Washington Post Editorial Board called out Kennedy’s anti-vax extremism in August. In September, the New York Times ran an op-ed by nine former leaders of the CDC speaking out against it.
Legacy media are doing everything they can to alert and inform the public of the dangers of Trump and Kennedy’s attacks on US science, except when it comes to healthcare for trans youth. There, the same outlets who are sounding the alarm over ideologically motivated crank beliefs have been dramatically more muted.
Last Thursday, Kennedy announced a sweeping scheme to end gender affirming care for youth at all US hospitals by targeting Medicaid and Medicare funding for any hospital who offered the treatments. In the New York Times, this anti-science, likely illegal scheme was described thusly, “Proposed new rules would punish the hospitals by pulling all federal financing. Advocates say lawsuits will follow.” Co-bylined on the story was a journalist whose bias and willingness to bend the truth on trans youth healthcare has been well documented.
Anyone who follows media criticism knows the New York Times has long shown a distinct anti-trans bias. Other outlets did a little better, placing the story in the context of the Trump administration’s relentless efforts to target the trans community. However, only one story I found, in the New Republic, made the connection between Kennedy’s repeated peddling of junk science and the effort to end healthcare for transgender minors.
Elsewhere, coverage of a war on US science, attacks on expertise, and ideology coming before evidence has left out attacks on transgender healthcare, implicitly placing them in a separate category. Medical news focused Stat’s prestige bait package, titled “American Science, Shattered,” contains zero stories on transgender healthcare, despite Stat reporters breaking the news of the background of bias among authors of the HHS review of trans youth care, upon which the decisions to restrict care are putatively based. An AP overview featuring experts from multiple disciplines pushing back on Kennedy’s claims to be pursuing “gold standard” science doesn’t include any trans youth care experts or mention gender-affirming medicine. Even a story in the Atlantic that takes more of a both-sidesing approach to Kennedy’s attacks on the scientific establishment doesn’t include trans healthcare anywhere in its laundry lists of places the HHS secretary diverges from the mainstream.
When Kennedy claimed to be grounding his decision to shut down research into mRNA vaccines in the data, the legacy press was clear that he was doing no such thing. Not so with the HHS report on trans youth care, which has instead been treated as part of an ongoing controversy with two equally valid sides, rather than as an example of the Trump administration’s attacks on science.
News media have dutifully covered the Trump administration’s all encompassing attack on the right of trans people to exist. What they haven’t done is place the attacks on trans healthcare where they belong, among the many examples of this administration’s attacks on science, evidence, and expertise. This is likely because the work to undermine the science on trans care had made it from the activist fringe into the mainstream press before RFK Jr. took over HHS. Legacy media entertained the ideas of activists and centered bad-faith questions, conspiracy theories about trans healthcare providers, and sometimes outright disinformation placing it on an equal footing with the careful, responsible science of trans youth care. Now, despite the fact that the leader of the HHS is a conspiracy theorist who openly shapes the data to meet his preferred result, trans healthcare has been marooned on its own island, not acknowledged as part of the larger scientific realm under attack, even though the playbook being run against trans care is the same as that being used to undermine vaccines.
This shows how powerful transphobia is, but it also shows how fragile journalists can be in the face of junk science and activist agendas. Today, news outlets that are considered centrist, mainstream, or unbiased don’t entertain anti-vax conspiracy theories. But their openness to the same conspiracy theories, positing that mainstream science has been perverted by profit and groupthink, when they target trans youth healthcare shows a weakness and susceptibility to pressure at the foundations of US science journalism.
Evan Urquhart is the founder of Assigned Media.