Administrators inside the National Institutes of Health and apparently across the Department of Health and Human Services have received guidance instructing them to, among other things, cancel contracts “that promote inculcate or gender ideology” by 5 pm on Friday. That and other difficult, counterproductive, and downright evil instructions, circulated via email and shared by several sources with Splinter, are ostensibly to comply with Donald Trump’s day one executive order on “defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government” — an order trans rights advocates have called “cruel” and “lawless.”
The instructions are based on a memo from the Office of Personnel Management sent on Wednesday with “initial guidance” on complying with that executive order. The OPM is busy in these early days, fresh off an absurd message to all federal employees trying and likely failing to convince a bunch of them to resign. In one message viewed by Splinter, heads of agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services are instructed to send an email to all agency employees “announcing that the agency will be complying with Defending Women and this guidance,” and to “Review all agency programs, contracts, and grants, and terminate any promote or inculcate gender ideology.”
Not only that, but they must review agency job descriptions, and immediately inform anyone in a position that “involves inculcating or promoting gender ideology that they are being placed on paid administrative leave.”
The effects of this are, to put it mildly, completely unclear. If the NIH rescinds any grant or contract to anything that allows a person to tick a box on a form specifying their gender as anything other male or female, would its entire operation cease to exist? One email with instructions adds: “Please consider implications of any documents being prepared pursuant to contractors performing their services (such as, for example, contractors who are responsible for preparing documents where participants in programs may be asked to fill out a survey or form that may ask for gender as a data field), which may need to be modified, as well.”
There are internal instructions circulating as well. Leadership has been told to “Cancel any trainings that inculcate or promote gender ideology or have done so in the past”; to disband or cancel employee resource groups or special emphasis programs that do so; to review all agency forms and ensure that they ask only for “sex” rather than “gender” and include only male and female as an option; and to “ensure that intimate spaces… are designated by biological sex and not gender identity.” They even are supposed to review agency email systems and turn off features that ask for users’ pronouns.
On Thursday, HHS added an update to the OPM diktat, confirming the need to “proceed with termination of all applicable contracts” by 5 pm on January 31. This all will, obviously, be an onerous and insane thing for all agencies to comply with. At NIH, the sheer number of clinical trial documents or patient databases, among other things, that might require amending from “gender” to “sex” makes this seem practically untenable. It is an assault on trans people, obviously, though that assault will ripple outward into an assault on research, science, and human health.
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