US health agency seeks to cut gender-related terms from scientific papers

The mandate from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention follows an executive order from president Donald Trump, and applies to research not yet published

The headquarters of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia.Credit: Getty

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has mandated that all scientific manuscripts produced by its researchers that are under review at a journal be withdrawn so that certain language relating to gender can be stripped from them.

The directive, sent by the agency’s chief science officer to some staff members on 31 January, is meant to bring the CDC into compliance with an executive order issued last month by US President Donald Trump seeking to restore “biological truth” to the federal government by recognizing only two sexes: male and female. Executive orders can direct agencies inside the federal government but cannot change existing laws.

According to a copy of the e-mail, shared in the newsletter Inside Medicine, manuscripts must not include any mention of terms including ‘gender’, ‘transgender’, ‘pregnant person’, ‘transsexual’ and ‘non-binary’, among others. CDC scientists who co-author papers originating from outside the agency that include these terms are also expected to rescind their authorship.

It’s unclear how many scientific reports will be affected by the mandate, which applies to all manuscripts written or co-authored by CDC researchers and includes papers that are being prepared for submission, in revisions with journal editors or have been accepted for publication but not yet posted online. It is also uncertain whether journals, which have their own rules for discussing gender and sex, will comply with the directive. Fields such as public health, which have embraced gender identity as an aspect of research in topics including health disparities, are likely to be affected the most by the rules.

“This announcement is mind-boggling in its implications,” says Thomas Babor, an emeritus professor of public health at UConn Health in Farmington, Connecticut. “Because of the enormous impact the CDC has in the United States and globally, the instruction to remove mentions of ‘forbidden terms’ could stifle the usefulness of scientific research for years to come.”

The US Department of Health and Human Services, which is the parent agency to the CDC, did not respond to a request for comment.

The importance of language

Gendered terms such as ‘man’, ‘woman’ and ‘non-binary’ have been widely embraced across scientific disciplines because, unlike terms related to biological sex (for example, male and female), they provide cultural, social and psychological context for a person’s lived experience.

The CDC mandate, however, erases mention of queer, intersex and transgender individuals from future literature and seems to legitimize “scientific sexism”, says James Mungin, a biomedical scientist at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, who identifies as transgender. Under the new rules, CDC researchers would be unable to share basic demographic data, such as gender identity or sexual orientation, about study participants — omissions that could lead to inaccuracies or ethical breaches if scientists are barred from disclosing why certain participants were removed from a study, Mungin says. Furthermore, gender identity and sexual orientation are nearly impossible to exclude when it comes to the study and treatment of conditions such as HIV or other sexually transmitted diseases, potentially causing harm to patients.

“If you’re working in basic science, you might get away with just references to sex, but gender is everywhere in public health,” says Ayden Scheim, a social epidemiologist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who identifies as trans and studies the health care of marginalized communities. “Unfortunately, I see two things happening: a lot of these withdrawn papers will never be published” because collaborators outside the CDC aren’t going to agree to omit data, Scheim says, “and in the long term, a lot of research that focuses on health inequities for women or LGBTQ+ people will disappear”.