Trump can't change the medical reality of trans by removing CDC web pages - it's like a dog barking at the Moon - Mayo clinic, John Hopkins, Cleveland Clinic etc continue to cover the truth in the USA

- any non government pages from Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, John Hopkins etc are legally protected from government editing by first amendment rights

As some of you will know, the CDC has taken down all pages that talk about transgender, or refer to “pregnant people” (because trans men can sometimes still become pregnant after transitioning) or mention the term LGBTQ.

Skip to Contents - or click on vertical column of dashes to left of page on laptop

List of some of the removed pages in the section: The truth can’t be changed by removing it from websites

UPDATE: A judge has ordered those pages to be restored. A judge has ordered those deleted pages on the CDC and FDA to be restored - the ones that talk about the medical reality of trans amongst other topics. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/02/11/health-agency-webpage-removal-lawsuit-00203582

It’s unprecedented and very odd. I found a wonderful painting by Miro which captures what Trump is doing perfectly to my mind :). He is like a dog barking at the moon, or a wolf baying at the Moon in a popular expression.

He is attempting something that is impossible as a dog can’t frighten away the Moon.

TEXT ON GRAPHIC:

Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, John Hopkins Center, etc. are all protected and their websites can't be edited by the US government by the 1st amendment.

Attempting the impossible - a dog can’t frighten away the Moon.

Similarly, Trump can’t change medical truth by getting the CDC to remove web pages.

Dog labeled Trump.

Moon labelled: Moon of truth about trans.

Dog barking at the moon - Miro

Trump editing the CDC website.

Painting here: https://www.joan-miro.net/dog-barking-at-the-moon.jsp

Detail from larger painting (added same text):

TEXT ON GRAPHIC:

Moon of truth about trans.

Dog barking at the moon - Miro (detail)

Trump editing the CDC website.

Contents

• Clear evidence of more than two genders

• High quality US web pages by the likes of Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic and John Hopkins Center for Transgender and Gender Expansive health

• Why do Republicans do this? Medical misinformation - which is why it’s so important that the correct information is still there

• Will there be legal challenges - hard to say - if not then it may be like what happened with climate change websites in Trump’s first term

• The truth can’t be changed by removing it from websites

• Puberty blockers do not make a kid sterile - just postpone puberty - some will then decide to resume puberty later on and others will decide to transition to the gender identity

• See also

UPDATE: Trump’s team has restord the deleted pages but in edited form - expect further challenges

The CDC has restored all the pages now. But what they did will surely not count as complying with the court order so I expect further legal challenges.

Trump's team has removed the letter T from LGBTQ and removed the word transgender almost everywhere on the page. The only section on transgender is the section: "YRBS transgender report"

It has also added a notice:

QUOTE Per a court order, HHS is required to restore this website as of 11:59PM ET, February 14, 2025. Any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate and disconnected from the immutable biological reality that there are two sexes, male and female. The Trump Administration rejects gender ideology and condemns the harms it causes to children, by promoting their chemical and surgical mutilation, and to women, by depriving them of their dignity, safety, well-being, and opportunities. This page does not reflect biological reality and therefore the Administration and this Department rejects it.

TEXT ON GRAPHIC:

Original page

Restored page

Removes almost all references to transgender.

Sure to get more legal challenges

Restored page: https://www.cdc.gov/healthy-youth/lgbtq-youth/health-disparities-among-lgbtq-youth.html

Original page: https://web.archive.org/web/20250117215525/https://www.cdc.gov/healthy-youth/lgbtq-youth/health-disparities-among-lgbtq-youth.html

I have never seen anything so bizarre in my entire life! Apparently according to Trump nobody is intersex or XX male or XY female or trans. And they refer to this as "biological reality"??!!

I expect further legal cases as this surely doesn't accord with what the judge ordered the team to do.

Clear evidence of more than two genders

This goes against the very clear evidence of science in the last few decades. We have

• XX males - genes of a woman, but brain and body of a man

• XY females - genes of a man, but brain and body of a woman

• Intersex - sexual organs with some characteristics of one sex and some characteristics of another sex

• Trans - their brains are one sex and their bodies another sex.

• Born physically a woman but grow a penis at adolescence.

• [many other variations]

You may have heard of 74 sexes. If you are interested the complete list is here:: What are the 72 other genders [other than male or female]?

All this variability surely must have evolutionary value. Some will be much rarer than others but for the more common variations, the numbers are quite high, several % so it’s not just occasional flukes like this.

Though nearly everyone is neatly male or female a few percent are neither, both, or part one part another.

It depends not just on the genes, but on gene expression - a symphony of different genes that need to turn on or off at different stages in gestation within the womb to form the developing sex organs and brain of a baby boy or baby girl. Most of it is all over by the time you are born, though it does continue of course later in life in puberty.

BLOG: Yes some people really are biologically trans or biologically gender fluid
— may be XX males
— XY females
— intersex
— have sexual organs that change gender as they mature
— and minds and brains out of sync with their bodily gender

High quality US web pages by the likes of Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic and John Hopkins Center for Transgender and Gender Expansive health

The first amendment makes it impossible for the US government to remove material from any websites they don’t themselves control. The president can’t do it of course, but Congress also can’t pass any law to remove it.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-1/

Whatever happens to the CDC pages, the US has many high quality medical websites not under the control of the government and which neither the president nor Congress can ever edit, where you can still find good information about transgender and transgender care.

Here for instance is Mayo clinic’s page about transgender, one of the highest reputation medical websites in the USA.

Mayo clinic: Learn more about what it means to be transgender or gender diverse.

And also just as high quality:

Cleveland clinic: Transgender: Gender Dysphoria and Ensuring Mental Health

John Hopkins Center for Transgender and Gender Expansive Health

The CDC are not necessarily the most important website on transgender. I expect those have as much information or more.

There will be many more. If anyone knows any more you particularly recommend do say in a comment.

Medical health professionals will have access to all of these too of course but will have many other ways to access information about how to treat trans people.

They will still have their medical text books, and medical references, journals, conferences, research papers... All the many websites and portals in the USA.

Also all the information on websites in other countries, from the WHO, EU, other countries globally.

Why do Republicans do this? Medical misinformation - which is why it’s so important that the correct information is still there

Many in the Republican party simply don't believe that transgender people exist. They genuinely think it's a mental illness that needs therapy to help them get over some confusion about their biological sex.

That is what is not true. For anyone genuinely trans, it is how they are born, it can't be changed and it can't be treated any more than being male or female can be treated. We now know that as a medical certainty.

Of course nobody thinks that being male or female is a mental illness and needs to be treated. It's as absurd as that when you understand the science.

This is something researchers knew for sure a couple of decades or so ago. The medical profession came next and throughout the medical profession they agree that people are born trans and that it is just how they are, a brain of one sex in a body of the opposite sex.

But it is only slowly percolating into the general public. I think that over time, give it a decade or two and this will be seen as archaic out of date thinking and people will wonder how anyone ever thought like this.

This may help when talking to others who believe sincerely that being trans is a mental illness.

Will there be legal challenges - hard to say - if not then it may be like what happened with climate change websites in Trump’s first term

I am trying to find out if it can and will be legally challenged. My intuition but that's all is that surely it must be but not any legal expert.

If it is legal to do this, then it will be like in his first term on climate change if this is permuted to continue.

In Trump's first term, individual states, NGOs, universities etc had many web pages about the science of global warming.

But the EPA din't have it and I think it was similar, information on global warming was scrubbed from all the pages controlled by the Trump administration.

Then as soon as Biden became president again, all that information was put back online.

I expect legal challenges for removing medical content, in ways you wouldn't get for global warming and EPA. Hope so anyway.

But if not, he can't control what anyone else puts online in the USA only what the Federal agencies put online.

Which means that anyone who wants information about transgender care witll go to Mayo clinic and other websites instead of the CDC.

The CDC has a unique role in gathering data globally in the USA, but the medical profession can replace that too.

For instance the CDC have removed the latest update of a survey of the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System. It was created 35 years ago and keeps track of nutrition, physical activity, tobacco and drug use, sexual behavior and other areas.

Last year for the first time,

QUOTE It asked students about "transgender identity" for the first time. The survey found that 3% of high school students self-identified as transgender and an additional 2% were "unsure."

Earlier updates that don't have that question remain online.

https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/01/31/nx-s1-5282274/trump-administration-purges-health-websites

So not sure what happens to that. Maybe they can still ask the question but have to remove the column with answers about gender identity in any tables published on the CDC website - so reserachers would still have access to it privately - or else they might have to do other surveys to get that information.

The truth can’t be changed by removing it from websites

So - for someone with a strong science background, all this is very very odd.

Just an entire area of science with thousands of researchers researching into it, thousands of papers, conferences etc, which the CDC is not allowed to present to the public because the current administration doesn't want it to be true.

Much like their stance on global warming science. It’s the same thing, an entire branch of science they don’t want to be true so they scrub it from all US government websites.

But they can't change what is true like that, all they can do is to remove information about the science they don't like from some websites that's all.

A list of some of the web pages taken down:

• Health Disparities Among LGBTQ Youth (archived page)

• Environmental Justice | Tracking Program (archived)

• Safer Food Choices for Pregnant People (archived)

• Interim Clinical Considerations for Use of Vaccine for Mpox Prevention (archived)

• Preventing HIV (archived)

• HIV Risk Behaviors (archived)

• Fast Facts: HIV and Transgender People (archived)

• Fast Facts: HIV in the US by Race and Ethnicity (archived)

https://www.medpagetoday.com/publichealthpolicy/generalprofessionalissues/114039

There is some good news here though.

First if you haven’t seen it this may help:

Your rights are protected. And the Supreme Court is at least 5 : 4 trans favorable as in that they treat "trans” as covered by requirements on not discriminating by sex. 4 of the Justices still in the Supreme Court have a previous history of voting that way. One is Jackson, appointed by Biden who as a liberal justice is sure to vote along with the other three liberal justices on this topic. Then there’s Amy Coney Barrett who is untested, nobody knows which way she would vote. She likely doesn’t know hereself until she immerses herself in the legal reasoning.

There is no risk to your freedom. You don’t need to worry that trans kids will be taken away from you or anything like that.

The main risk is to Federal funding of trans treatments, and Federal treatment of trans people - so far, that's Trump's order to stop gender affirming hormone treatment for trans women in female prisons and transfer them to male prisons.

Incidentally good news on that - a judge has blocked an attempt to transfer a trans women to a male prison and stop her hormone treatments to hear the case.

She is still in the woman’s prison.

Her lawyers are challenging the case on two grounds.

1. discrimination on grounds of sex.

2. the 8th amendment prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.

This will likely go up to the Supreme Court eventually though it's early stages yet.

About the block:

QUOTE STARTS

BOSTON — A U.S. judge has temporarily blocked federal prison officials from transferring a transgender woman to a men’s facility and denying her access to gender-affirming care in accordance with an executive order issued by President Donald Trump, her lawyers said on Thursday.

The temporary restraining order was issued by U.S. District Judge George O’Toole in Boston on Sunday while the inmate’s case was sealed in what appeared to be the first lawsuit challenging an order Trump signed on Jan. 20, his first day back in office, targeting what he called “gender ideology extremism.”

Moe’s lawyers said that a day after Trump signed his order, officials with the federal Bureau of Prisons informed her she was being transferred from a women’s prison to a men’s facility, exposing her to an “extremely high risk of harassment, abuse, violence and sexual assault.”

Her lawyers said the Bureau of Prisons switched how it publicly identified her from “female” to “male” and had been poised to cut off the inmate’s access to hormones she has taken since she was a teenager to treat her gender dysphoria.

Her lawyers argued that Trump’s executive order discriminated based on sex in violation of the plaintiff’s due process rights under the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment.

The lawyers argued that her impending transfer to a men’s prison also would violate the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/federal-judge-blocks-trump-administration-transferring-transgender-inm-rcna19015#

Then there’s the matter of the X for neither gender on passports. Biden didn’t want to add that because of the expense and time involved (an entire year to add it to the software).

But he was forced to do so after a case that spanned three presidents from Obama through Trump to Biden.

Now Trump has removed that X. But given that Biden was forced to add it, likely Trump is as well - well so it seems to me.

Puberty blockers do not make a kid sterile - just postpone puberty - some will then decide to resume puberty later on and others will decide to transition to the gender identity

gives a child time to get older without having to cope with the stress of puberty into a sext that doesn't match her brain. This is reversible. It doesn't cause sterility. In some teens as she gets older her brain may get into sync with her body. She can decide when she is more mature whether to go through with puberty or whether to use hormones to transition her body to he same sex as her brain if she continues to have the gender identity opposite to her body.

The science is firmly behind puberty blockers and so also is the medical profession. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/gender-dysphoria/in-depth/pubertal-blockers/art-20459075

It might help to read my blog post about how some people really are trans. Not through choice. Most of them would much prefer not to be trans but those are the cards they were dealt with by biology, a brain of one sex maturing in a body of the opposite sex due to something that happened already in the fetus that they can't change.

BLOG: Yes some people really are biologically trans or biologically gender fluid
— may be XX males
— XY females
— intersex
— have sexual organs that change gender as they mature
— and minds and brains out of sync with their bodily gender

See also

What Trump could really do in his first 24 hours and in his first 100 days - not the scary things you may think are possible

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TIPS FOR DEALING WITH DOOMSDAY FEARS

If suicidal or helping someone suicidal see my:

BLOG: Supporting someone who is suicidal

If you have got scared by any of this, health professionals can help. Many of those affected do get help and find it makes a big difference.

They can’t do fact checking, don’t expect that of them. But they can do a huge amount to help with the panic, anxiety, maladaptive responses to fear and so on.

Also do remember that therapy is not like physical medicine. The only way a therapist can diagnose or indeed treat you is by talking to you and listening to you. If this dialogue isn’t working for whatever reason do remember you can always ask to change to another therapist and it doesn’t reflect badly on your current therapist to do this.

Also check out my Seven tips for dealing with doomsday fears based on things that help those scared, including a section about ways that health professionals can help you.

I know that sadly many of the people we help can’t access therapy for one reason or another - usually long waiting lists or the costs.

There is much you can do to help yourself. As well as those seven tips, see my:

BLOG: Doing what matters at times of stress
— new WHO booklet to help with mental health during COVID19 pandemic

BLOG: Breathe in and out slowly and deeply and other ways to calm a panic attack

BLOG: Tips from CBT
— might help some of you to deal with doomsday anxieties