Sec. Bobby Kennedy Allows Release of Shocking HHS Study Linking Transgender Ideology to Leftist Political Violence

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services has released an explosive government-commissioned study examining the relationship between radical transgender ideology, left-wing authoritarianism, and the justification of political violence.

The HHS study, titled Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology?, surveyed 1,208 American adults.

Researchers from Rutgers University, the Manhattan Institute, and the Network Contagion Research Institute found that people who more strongly endorsed so-called “gender-affirming” positions were also more likely to display left-wing authoritarian attitudes and consider political violence justified.

The report marks a dramatic departure from the politically protected “science” Americans were fed under the Biden regime, when federal health agencies treated radical gender ideology as unquestionable dogma and smeared dissenters as hateful extremists.

Kennedy’s HHS allowed the evidence to be released, and the findings are devastating.

According to the official HHS announcement, the researchers developed a five-question Clinical Gender Affirmation Scale, or CGAS, using positions drawn from guidance published by the American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association, World Professional Association for Transgender Health, and American Academy of Pediatrics.

The questions measured agreement with claims that:

• Failing to affirm a person’s claimed gender identity causes psychological harm.
• People should be supported in expressing a transgender identity.
• Using a person’s chosen transgender name is necessary.
• Using preferred pronouns is necessary.
• Parents should support their children’s transgender “exploration.”

Researchers compared the results with established measurements of left-wing authoritarianism and respondents’ willingness to justify six examples of political violence:

• Killing Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk
• Killing President Donald Trump
• Killing UnitedHealthcare executive Brian Thompson
• Setting fire to ICE buildings
• Damaging property belonging to wealthy people
• Committing violence against police officers

The results were shocking.

Support for the gender-ideology positions was positively associated with justification for violence in all six scenarios.

Those associations remained statistically significant even after researchers controlled for respondents’ left-wing political identity.

The strongest adjusted association involving the gender-affirmation scale concerned justification for killing Charlie Kirk.

The study found correlations ranging from 0.23 to 0.35 between its gender-affirmation scale and support for the six violent scenarios. The relationship involving left-wing authoritarianism was even stronger, ranging from 0.47 to 0.54.

The gender-affirmation scale also reportedly accounted for 31.5% of the variation in left-wing authoritarianism scores.

The researchers concluded that radical gender ideology could function as an “ideological accelerant” by telling authoritarian leftists who their enemies are, portraying political disagreements as existential threats, and providing moral justification for coercion or violence.

“This study raises important questions about what happens when ideology is given the authority of medicine,” Assistant Secretary for Health Admiral Brian Christine said in the HHS announcement.

The report does include an important limitation: It measured whether respondents believed violence was justified. It did not determine whether they had committed violence or intended to commit it.

The cross-sectional survey also does not prove that gender ideology causes political violence. The researchers acknowledged that radical gender beliefs could strengthen authoritarian attitudes, left-wing authoritarians could be attracted to gender ideology, or another factor could influence both.

A second preregistered experiment is being designed to investigate whether exposure to gender-ideology messaging can directly cause the attitudes identified in the first survey.

Still, the results expose a glaring double standard in American academic research.

For decades, left-wing academics obsessed over supposed authoritarian tendencies among conservatives while refusing to apply the same scrutiny to their own political movement.

Now, the Kennedy-led HHS is forcing the establishment to confront evidence that authoritarianism and support for violence are hardly confined to the political right.