Concerning developments within the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
Critical "DEI" pages have gone dark, and all projects and research containing "forbidden words" about "gender ideology" are now banned from publication in both internal and external journals.
Preface: Some of what I want to talk about here is based on second-hand information and unofficial memo leaks from publicly-unidentified federal workers in the resistance movement, and thus can conservatively be treated as hearsay until proven. However, interpretations and details have come from current & former federal employees, medical professionals with a great deal of experience in using CDC data and research, reporting by major news outlets, and my own experiences as a (state-level) government scientist.
I am not attempting to spread fear & panic, but rather to try to explain some of what is happening in this rapidly-working openly-fascist regime. Policies may change day-by-day (and hour-by-hour) after the time of me writing this, and not all of the information and decisions presented here may be permanently accurate or finalized.
The Trump administration has released a plethora of rapid-fire executive orders targeting so many marginalized communities, with a strong focus on trying to erase trans & non-binary people from existence in the United States. We have “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”, “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation”, “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness” and "Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing", as well as a memo that halts processing passport applications with the X gender marker (and potentially all passport applications with a gender marker change), and a memo stating that pronouns have to be removed from email signatures and that bathrooms should be enforced by birth sex, with assuredly more to come. Overall, federal employees involved in programs identified as DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) are being placed on paid administrative leave if not outright fired.
Although these executive orders, policies, memos are not enshrined in any new law or act of Congress and constitute a wide variety of illegal activities, the US Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), appears to be complying in advance with reviewing and scrubbing or deleting pages & references/words related to gender, trans/non-binary people, intersex people, most otherwise LGBTQIA+ people, suicide data and prevention for LGBTQIA+ children, HIV/AIDS resources, contraceptives, pregnant “people”, chestfeeding, contraceptives, diversity, equity, and more.
The CDC temporarily removed the U.S. Medical Eligibility Criteria for Contraceptive Use, a document/page that is intended for medical providers to use for determining safe and effective birth control methods for people with varying health conditions and considerations. It was republished today with a banner reading "CDC’s website is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders." (You can find it via the Wayback Machine with the last updated date by the CDC of Nov 19, 2024, in case the page goes dark again). Another document, U.S. Selected Practice Recommendations for Contraceptive Use, 2024, is flagged but still online (this is the Wayback snapshot from Dec 31st in case this page goes dark too).
It could be that these documents are “simply” going to be revised to remove phrases like “pregnant people” to replace it with “pregnant women” and to remove LGBTQIA+ references, but we just don’t know yet. If you’re a medical provider, I highly recommend grabbing a local copy of these documents if you don’t have them already saved. In addition, Reproductiverights.gov is entirely gone.
The CDC has also removed nearly every page on HIV, including “key information on the rate of HIV diagnoses, breakdowns of infections by race and gender and the probability of HIV transmission by various forms of sex” (quote source). Currently, all of the CDC HIV information has been condensed into a single, very lacking HIV page, which also displays the “CDC’s website is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders” banner.
Officials in the Department of Health and Human Services as well as the CDC have stated that some pages will be returned to public view after the language and topics have been censored (my word, not theirs), however, we don’t know which ones or how many, or if they will be restored with any semblance of accurate information.
Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (A teaching hospital in Harvard Medical School) published breaking news last night (Feb 1, 2025) that CDC scientists have been ordered to retract or halt the publication of any research manuscript being considered by ANY journal (not just internal publications) to ensure that "forbidden terms" don't appear.
This includes articles that are submitted to a journal and in the revisions process, AND those that are accepted for publication but not yet printed/posted for access online. This censorship is even greater and wider impacting than the current gag order preventing CDC staff from discussing new findings with the public.
The forbidden words are “gender, transgender, pregnant person, pregnant people, LGBT, transsexual, non-binary, nonbinary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, biologically female." A previous officially public memo describes other actions being taken to remove “gender ideology” pages, programs, and research to comply with Trumps “Defending Women” executive order.
It appears at this time that a Trump political appointee will be required to authorize the release of data and submitting a publication, and currently the only one in the CDC is acting director Susan Monarez (who is not a CDC career civil servant and thus an “unconventional” appointment). It is currently unknown if lower officials can work as censors and authorize resubmissions of research to professional journals or not, or if the censors even have to be scientists or doctors at all. In any case, this policy is going to create a huge bottleneck for disseminating medical research from the CDC, resulting in (likely significant) delays in sharing crucial information on all sorts of medicine, public health science, and timely updates on diseases circulating within the US.
There are going to be major issues for basically any study that includes demographic data on sex (because "gender" is often used interchangeably with "sex", but "sex" itself could be a filthy DEI word too depending on the context) and/or sexual orientation, because all of that material will need to be reviewed by censors. Basically, all current and future CDC medical research during this administration will be under scrutiny purely due to demographics info, even if they aren't actually specifically on gender.
Concerns are also high that research and papers discussing health disparities by/for any different demographic factors are just going to have those details scrubbed out because anything even mentioning anyone but cisgender heterosexual white men (and maybe cishet white women) are just "woke". Medicine throughout Western history has typically assumed that cishet white men are the research standard, and so that’s nothing really new, but the gains we have made in showing that different demographic groups have different responses to medications, vaccines, diseases, and health conditions in general could be eliminated from the US federal government reports. Like, researchers are still “discovering” in many settings/labs that Black people aren’t immune from pain, that autistic people have compassion and empathy, and that people with uteruses actually need pain management during IUD insertions (even though they could have just, you know, asked people in these populations). We don’t know if all or most demographic data will be stripped yet, but researchers and doctors are preparing.
My personal opinions on the CDC complying in advance:
Many federal scientists are 100% for sure trying to decide if they comply and still get out some crucial medical research, or if they more overtly resist & get fired (or leave) and we end up with critical gaps for years in even more federal medical data sets with brain drain. It's not an easy position when there are ongoing studies that take years to set up and conduct, especially when you monitor subjects for months and years after (assuming the research project isn't being cancelled already due to involving DEI).
Is it better to have published data that is just (likely) about cishet white men and is horribly skewed, limited, potentially sort-of-falsified in terms of interpretations, and will negatively impact things for at least a decade+, or no research at all that includes all of us who aren't cishet white men that will negatively impact things for at least decade+? I don't know but personally I lean the former; maybe data on all participants will still be collected silently as acts of resistance even if not formally reported and published on now, with the idea that if/when the fascist control "ends" it can be disseminated? I do believe that data on a very limited or demographically undifferentiated population with regards to infectious disease and vaccinations is better than no monitoring at all, but who knows if those things will even be communicated to the public regardless of who they are studying (we’ve already seen this with COVID monitoring disappearing).
Then there's the huge probability that the people working on "gender ideology" research and programs are already on administrative paid leave on their way to getting shuffled around or fired as per other released memos and so researchers and project leads just aren't physically there to resist.
I have no answers and I wish I was in the loop about the internal resistance but my government work isn't with the feds and I am not in the need to know category. And I totally get it, it's safer to not have extra people seeing things who could potentially leak resistance information (whether on purpose or by accident)!
The Resistance:
The Alt National Parks Service (Facebook, Bluesky) is a really critical follow if you want some of the information on the federal employee resistance efforts; they aren't just National Parks Service employees since the movement grew so rapidly with the first Trump administration but the name has stuck. They are reporting that their resistance coalition includes over 50,000 federal employees across all areas of government, and that they need the general public to be contacting and being an extreme bother to our elected representatives with demanding transparency and restoration of critical health monitoring programs, as well as reaching out to news stations to spread the word.
Another avenue in which to currently help is by preserving the database of CDC datasets uploaded to data.cdc.gov before January 28th, 2025 and acting as a “seed”. Peer-to-peer data sharing has been a common practice for a very long time now, in which folks who have downloaded a “torrent” reupload files so that others can download them much more quickly with the load being shared amongst many networks (all of this is handled automatically by torrent programs). "Seeding" means letting the program run even once your download is finished so that others can download the files too. Do this on a desktop computer, not mobile!
At the Internet Archive dataset link above, look for "TORRENT" under Download Options. Hit "Start Torrent" to download directly in your browser, or "Save .torrent File" to open in your torrent program of choice (I use qBittorent). The file is 98.5 gigs, so make sure you have enough storage space on your computer!
Fortunately, we live in a time in which the fascists cant burn the books and library down and irrevocably destroy decades of medical, psychological, and sociological research and literature on LGBTQIA+ people, sex ed, gynecology, and contraception. Thank fuck for data redundancy and those willing to do anything they can to preserve the federal research we have.
If you are a fed, your efforts are not unseen or unappreciated. The pressure and gravity of the situation has to be just so exhausting and all-consuming. You matter and thank you so much.
I don’t have many more good words to say at the moment, other than “gut up” and steel yourselves for what may come to pass. The censorship and control of information is actively happening in real time, every day, and the average public only has so many ways in which impact this. Everything that is happening within our federal government since January 20th is unprecedented in USA history, although we can draw parallels from other previous and current governments worldwide… and it ain’t good. We will be relying on other governments and organizations for so much of our healthcare information, provided they don’t crumble too from a lack of US funding contributions.
There are so many demands on our attention, time, energy, and emotional bandwidth, and only so much we can hold all at once. Take care of yourselves and don’t feel guilty for resting, turning off the news, doing something that makes you happy, or only being able to focus on one group of things at a time. In fact, I encourage all of these things; if we burn ourselves entirely out, we don’t have the ability to resist. If we fall into despair, we can’t resist. If we don’t remember the love we have for each other in our communities, we can’t effectively resist. Our very existence as people in marginalized communities is resistance. Do what you can, where you can, when you can, how you can.
Even if we have never spoken, won’t ever meet, don’t cross paths, know that I love you and you are loved. They can’t truly erase us.
Thank you for this important work.
“The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.From The Principles of Newspeak,” George Orwell 1984