The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will no longer process transgender identity data to comply with the executive command of President Trump, Agency representative Melissa Dibble told Tuesday.
Sexual orientation data is not influenced and “will be processed according to the usual protocols,” Dibble added.
The decision will probably affect a number of federal health monitoring systems, including the National HIV behavior monitoring at Transgender Women and the Behavioral risk factor surveillance system. There is a great lack of data about trans- and non -dismantling people in the US, so these survey systems that include these serve as critical means for researchers.
The shift already has consequences for the Youth risk behavior systemA unique source of behavioral health data that is collected from high school students every other year. Researchers are dependent on following health behavior, including sexual behavior, substance use, mental health and more. State and local authorities can use the data to develop youth initiatives and policy. These are the only national representative data about trans -young.
The YRBSS surveys are managed in odd for years, which means that students throughout the country have to sit somewhere before the end of this school year to fill in the questionnaires. They were completed by the CDC last year, including One question About transgender identity that has been optional for states since 2019 and part of the more fixed, standard set of questions since 2023. But now Dibble says that the survey is “changed” to meet the orders.
“This is extremely disturbing,” says Tazlina Mannix, a former data manager -epidemiologist in Alaska who is currently working on a doctorate in public health at Johns Hopkins. “Historically, everyone currently has a final survey for months and collect data with that tool.”
Less than two weeks after President Trump had issued an executive order that against scientific evidence stated that there are only two genera, web pages and data sets that could otherwise indicate, were removed from the government’s health agency. YRBSS data was one of the first disappearances. The data returned after a judicial order, but it is unclear how the court’s decision can apply to the collection of future data.
“You cannot build up evidence if you cannot identify the population,” said a public health worker who previously worked with the YRBSs and spoke about the condition of anonymity. “So that’s a huge fundamental challenge.”
Dibble did not respond to questions about how the survey would be changed exactly, but it is likely that the question about the standard YRBSS about transgender identity will be removed. Public health workers at state level with knowledge of the YRBSS process said that they had heard that the CDC will not support data aggregation in the question of whether states choose to include them in their individual, local surveys.
Many states participating in the YRBSS have already chosen to include the question about transgender identity in their surveys at state level (which are given to individual samples of young people than the national representative survey), but it is unclear how much more will leave the question . The orders.
New York will manage a “revised” survey of the CDC this spring, according to Rachel Connors, a representative of the Education Department of the State. But from 20 February it had to receive that revised version from the CDC.
If the administration of the YRBSS surveys is delayed because of the changes, this may affect the response rates, Mannix said. If states do not have their survey material, they can see lower response rates of schools.
“It also calls some worries about the integrity of the data,” said Ariel Beccia, a researcher and instructor at the Harvard Th Chan School of Public Health that relies on YRBSS data. “This was an approved survey and now we don’t know what it happens to the approved series of questions, and who makes these decisions and why. It is all behind closed doors. So I think that creates a lot of worries. “
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