The Trump administration's Department of Health and Human Services has published a report purporting to link so-called "left-wing authoritarianism" to violence, with trans people squarely in its sights. The research was conducted by two organisations: the Manhattan Institute and the Network Contagion Research Institute, both of them conservative think tanks with well-documented track records of producing findings that align neatly with right-wing political positions. The Human Rights Campaign has responded swiftly and clearly: this is not research. This is a political operation, funded by taxpayers, designed to make trans Americans look dangerous.

The conclusion came before the evidence

That is the critical point. Good research starts with a question and follows the evidence wherever it leads. What the HRC is describing here is the reverse: a predetermined conclusion, then a search for anything that might present it as science. Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, put it plainly: "This is another example of the outcome leading the research."

I have watched this pattern play out before, and it is never accidental. You do not commission a report from two conservative advocacy organisations if you want an honest answer. You commission them when you already have the answer and need a document to wave at people. The question to ask is not whether the methodology is sound. It is: who ordered this, and what were they hoping it would do?

Using government as a weapon

Robinson's statement names what is actually happening: "The Trump administration and officials like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have used our own government as a cudgel against LGBTQ+ people, and increasingly, the transgender community specifically." That is a serious charge, and I think it is correct. When the department responsible for the health of a population produces material designed to pathologise that same population, something has gone fundamentally wrong. HHS exists to protect public health, not to manufacture threats out of marginalised communities.

The timing matters too. The HRC's statement links this directly to the midterms, and that reading makes sense. Stoking fear about a minority group is a reliable way to animate a base and distract from policy failures. Trans people are not a new target; they have been the focus of a sustained political campaign for years now. What is new is the brazenness of using a federal health department to produce the ammunition.

Trans people are not an ideology

Robinson said it, and it needs saying again: "Trans people are not an ideology. They are human beings and our fellow Americans who deserve the same dignity as anyone else." I would add only that this is true everywhere, not just in America. Trans people are not a movement, not a threat, not a symbol of cultural decline, not a political problem to be solved. They are people, living their lives, trying to get on with things the rest of us take for granted.

Every report like this one does real damage, even when the methodology collapses under scrutiny. It shifts what feels permissible to say. It gives cover to discrimination. It tells trans people, especially trans young people, that the government sees them as a danger rather than a citizen. That message lands, and it leaves marks.

What political violence actually has to do with any of this

The HRC is careful to say, and rightly so, that political violence is never acceptable. That is not a concession; it is a fact. But framing trans identity as a vector for violence is not a legitimate public health concern. It is a smear. The actual data on violence involving trans communities runs in entirely the other direction: trans people, and trans women of colour in particular, face disproportionate rates of violence. A government genuinely concerned with safety would be examining that. This one is not.

What this report does is take a real concern, political violence, and attach it to a group that has nothing to do with it, in order to make that group seem frightening. It is the oldest move in the playbook, and it works by making people feel that the category itself is the problem rather than any specific action or actor.

Science deserves better than this

I have spent years watching evidence get weaponised rather than followed in debates about trans healthcare. The Cass Review in the UK is the clearest recent example on this side of the Atlantic. What this HHS report represents is the same impulse applied to an even broader canvas: not just trans healthcare, but trans existence. The message is that trans people are, by their nature, a social problem.

They are not. And a government that uses public money to say otherwise is not doing science. It is doing politics, badly and harmfully, at the expense of people who deserve far better from the institutions that are supposed to serve them.