President Joe Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services spent six figures paying Drexel University researchers to interview transgender people in India, according to federal records.
Between March 2021 and February 2024, HHS paid out $389,087 to a team of academics at Drexel to perform “quantitative” interviews with 30 transgender men across Delhi and Mumbai, India’s two largest cities. Additionally, the Biden administration provided the researchers with federal funding to distribute online surveys to 300 transgender men living in those cities. The ultimate goals of the publicly-funded research project were to “inform the development and evaluation of an intervention to promote mental health” for transgender people in India and to “impact rapidly evolving transgender health and social policies in India and beyond.”
Specifically, the study investigated the prevalence of mental health conditions, such as anxiety and suicidality, among transgender people in India. It sought to understand what variables were contributing to the occurrence of those conditions. The framework used by the team of Drexel researchers aimed to “put the gender back into transgender health,” according to the grant’s description.
The researchers argued that their work is necessary because the “transgender community is experiencing major socio-legal changes that may affect mental health” in India. One of the policy recommendations made in the final report produced by the team of researchers was to implement public funding for “gender-affirmative healthcare,” including hormone therapy and sex change surgeries.
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HHS has positioned itself as a champion of the transgender community under Biden, adopting a new rule in April requiring physicians and healthcare personnel to provide transgender healthcare to patients, including minors. Critics have argued that the rule doesn’t grant sufficient exceptions for healthcare providers who have religious reasons to refuse to practice transgender medical interventions.
Biden appointed Adm. Rachel Levine, a biological male who identifies as a woman, as the assistant secretary of HHS and the head of the Commissioned Corps of the Public Health Service in 2021. Since joining HHS, Levine has pushed to loosen limits on transgender surgeries for minors, alongside other priorities advocated by LGBT activists.
The agency’s focus on transgender matters follows two of Biden’s executive orders. The first, from January 2021, ordered all federal agencies to combat discrimination against transgender individuals, and another, from June 2022, explicitly called on HHS to “seek funding opportunities related to health, including mental health, for LGBTQI+ individuals.”
The Biden administration has approved several grants aimed at supporting members of the LGBT community living in India. For instance, tax dollars routed through the State Department went toward training thousands of protransgender activists in the country. Another State Department grant provided financial support to a “queer” Muslim organization to give “LGBTQI” people in South Asia a platform to write.
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Billionaire Elon Musk, whom President-elect Donald Trump has tapped to lead an agency focused on improving government efficiency, has signaled interest in cutting funding to programs such as these.
HHS did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.
