By Sarah Holliday
The Washington Stand
According to its website, the mission of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) “is to enhance the health and well-being of all Americans, by providing for effective health and human services and by fostering sound, sustained advances in the sciences underlying medicine, public health, and social services.” This is the same government agency that posted on X last March, “Today and always, transgender health care is health care. Period.”
Yet HHS has approved numerous grants for transgenderism, which many experts do not consider “effective,” “sound,” or positively impacting the “health and well-being” of any American.
In late January, HHS approved a grant of $698,736 for the Biden administration to put toward California’s Center for Innovative Public Health Research, which promotes radical gender ideology. This was not the first grant HHS authorized for the Biden administration to advance the LGBT agenda, but it’s also not the last.
Most recently, HHS approved over $1.4 million to fund a study the Biden administration is conducting to “help ‘transgender people’ cope with financial and psychological ‘stress’ related to the COVID-19 pandemic,” the Daily Caller reported on Monday. The study is projected to go through March 2027, and its funding is going to Duke University, along with other organizations, to “develop interventions” specifically for people who identify as transgender to deal with effects from the pandemic.
The study is taxpayer-funded and currently has 360 trans-identifying people enrolled. There will be surveys held at six-month intervals, and the participants will receive “money and financial literacy education.” The grant’s description claims that those who identify as transgender are “particularly vulnerable to COVID-19 pandemic-related financial and mental health harms,” and that “sustainable, multilevel interventions are needed to address these harms and promote COVID-19 prevention behaviors.”
The grant summary also states, “In addition to addressing the pressing impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on a vulnerable health disparities population, this study will advance the science of minority stress and mental health iniquities.”
Why is the COVID relief study geared specifically toward those who identify as transgender when the pandemic severely affected millions across the globe? Joseph Backholm, senior fellow for Biblical Worldview and Strategic Engagement at Family Research Council, shared his thoughts with The Washington Stand.
“I think there are a couple things going on here,” he said. “Some of it is purely political. Politicians seem to benefit more by creating projects for groups rather than just doing things that help everyone. Voters are selfish so politicians have learned that it’s more valuable to be targeted in your assistance. This kind of thing happens in a million different ways in government.” But aside from the political motivation, Backholm added that “leftism insists on seeing people primarily as members of a group rather than as individuals.”
He continued, “Where I agree with the Biden administration is that trans people are ‘particularly vulnerable,’ but we disagree as to why.” As Backholm put it, trans-identifying people are classified as “vulnerable because the world [largely] refuses” to believe that “men can magically become women.” Rather, “[A] trans identity is evidence of underlying issues that make an individual vulnerable in a variety of ways.”
Backholm went on to argue that the “Biden administration’s problem is not that they recognize people who identify as trans are vulnerable. They are.” Instead, he asserted, the problem is that they consider what are really symptoms of mental health problems as evidence of health, and those mental health problems are fueled with “gender affirmation, which they consider health care.” This “health care” is then funded with millions of dollars out of the pockets of taxpayers.
Backholm concluded, “[I]n the end, it’s a virtue signal for those who fund the program, and some researchers will make some money, but no one gets any better.”
