Photo by Karollyne Videira Hubert on Unsplash

The May 1, 2025 HHS report marks yet another chilling chapter in the Trump administration’s crusade against transgender people—this time under the guise of “protecting children.” With 409 pages of cherry-picked data and moral panic, the federal government is not just shifting health policy; it’s attempting to reassert state control over gender identity itself.

This move—positioning behavioral therapy as the preferred method over gender-affirming care—echoes a long, global history of institutions pathologizing queerness. It’s conversion therapy with a fresh coat of policy paint. In many ways, it feels like we’re being hurled back in time, when psychiatry was weaponized to “correct” nonconforming bodies and minds. Feminist scholar Susan Stryker reminds us that “transgender people have historically been made to carry the burden of gender’s failure to conform to binary expectations.” This report doesn’t alleviate that burden—it reinforces it.

The Trump administration’s decision to erase scientific consensus in favor of politicized pseudoscience is not surprising, but it is deeply dangerous. Just like how 19th-century sexologists used “diagnosis” to control women’s sexuality and autonomy—branding them with hysteria or sexual deviance—we’re now seeing trans identity treated as a clinical problem, something to be examined, treated, and restrained. Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote, “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” This administration flips that logic on its head, insisting through legislation that identity must be fixed, binary, and state-approved.

What’s particularly dystopian is how the report pretends to be neutral. HHS claims it doesn’t make clinical recommendations—only “reviews” the science. But omitting the names of its authors, erasing a 2023 SAMHSA finding that debunked behavioral “conversion,” and selectively citing outdated studies isn’t transparency. It’s narrative control. It’s bio-political gaslighting.

And the stakes are not abstract. With the rescinding of $477 million in grants and the shuttering of multiple clinics, real children are losing access to lifesaving care. This isn’t just a policy change—it’s an act of violence. Judith Butler warned that when governments regulate who gets to be recognized as human, they also decide who can be grieved. When care is denied, when rights are stripped, when language is twisted—what we’re watching isn’t a debate over science. It’s a question of who gets to survive.

The administration’s actions fit into a larger trend of authoritarian governance using “child protection” as a pretext for erasure. From book bans to school gag orders to this HHS report, the state isn’t protecting children—it’s protecting power. As Audre Lorde said, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Behavioral therapy cannot “fix” an identity the state refuses to validate. You cannot use the tools of erasure to build a future where trans people live safely and freely.

The cruelty here is not just the point—it’s policy. And the rest of us have a moral obligation to name it for what it is, to resist it however we can, and to center the voices of those directly harmed. Trans youth do not need behavioral correction. They need protection—from this administration’s dangerous ideology masquerading as science.