Trump Officials Ask CDC, FDA to Use Gender Notice on Restored Websites

The Washington Post

13:29 JST, February 15, 2025

The Trump administration has directed the nation’s premier health agencies to place a notice harshly condemning “gender ideology” on agency webpages that a federal judge ordered be restored online this week.

Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration were asked to place a notice on “any restored pages that were taken down due to their content promoting gender ideology,” according to an email sent from an official at the Department of Health and Human Services on Thursday evening. The Washington Post obtained a copy of the email.

As of Friday morning, the notice is included on the two webpages the FDA was directed to restore, which provide guidance for researchers on how to increase enrollment of females in clinical trials and interpret sex-specific data, as well as improving participation of underrepresented populations in such trials.

“Any information on this page promoting gender ideology is extremely inaccurate and disconnected from the immutable biological reality that there are two sexes, male and female,” the notice reads. “The Trump Administration rejects gender ideology and condemns the harms it causes to children, by promoting their chemical and surgical mutilation, and to women, by depriving them of their dignity, safety, well-being, and opportunities. This page does not reflect biological reality and therefore the Administration and this Department reject it.”

Some of the wording echoes language in an executive order President Donald Trump issued on his first day in office called “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”

While there are some areas of debate, scientists widely agree that biological sex in humans is more complex than a simple binary, as the executive order indicates.

“What’s really important about the notices that came out is that it’s political and not biologically accurate or even logical,” said Julia McGuire, a senior lecturer at the University of Maine who teaches and coordinates the university’s introduction to biology program. McGuire said that the development of the male and female reproductive cells does not begin at conception, as the executive order defined it, and that “sex organs don’t begin to develop until several weeks in.”

The CDC has restored webpages abruptly taken offline late last month but had not added the new language as of Friday morning. However, by Friday afternoon, the notice had been posted to multiple public health websites containing information about getting tested for HIV, health risks for youths, and contraceptive guidance for health-care providers, among other topics.

The webpages were pulled from the internet as health officials scrambled to comply with Trump’s executive order directing federal agencies to recognize only males and females and to use the term “sex” and not “gender” in all “applicable federal policies and documents.” Guidance from the Office of Personnel Management directed agencies to end to “all agency programs that use taxpayer money to promote or reflect gender ideology” as outlined in the executive order.

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered that the webpages be back online by the end of the day. But the language HHS directed its agencies to include adds a wrinkle to the Trump administration’s moves to control content on the health agencies’ websites, efforts that health-care providers, public health experts and researchers have blasted.

Reshma Ramachandran – who is on the board of directors of the nonprofit advocacy group Doctors for America, which sued over the removal of the webpages – called the new language “disconcerting.” She said she prefers the notice not be included online but was glad the webpages had been restored.

“These are websites that have information that’s been updated based on data, information that’s meant to be based in science, and they put a nonscientific notice just based on ideology,” said Ramachandran, who is an assistant professor at the Yale School of Medicine.

The notices could draw renewed scrutiny from U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, who is overseeing the case. In a written order this week, the judge directed the health agencies to restore the webpages and datasets “to their versions as of January 30, 2025.”

At a Monday hearing in D.C. federal court, Bates told a Justice Department attorney that the websites should have been left unchanged while the administration reviewed their content for compliance with Trump’s executive order.

“That would have made a lot of sense,” the judge said.

Attorneys for the group of medical practitioners who sued to restore the websites did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether they would challenge the new notices in court. An attorney for the Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A spokesperson for HHS, which includes the CDC and the FDA, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“This highlights the absurdity of the court’s decision, which forces the Trump administration to continue to post Biden-era gender ideology as ‘science’ but with disclaimers saying that the public should not believe a word of it,” said Roger Severino, who led the HHS civil rights office during the Trump administration and is now a vice president at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

The judge granted a temporary restraining order requested by Doctors for America, directing the administration to bring back public information maintained by the CDC and the FDA while a lawsuit challenging the decision to remove it is pending.

The doctors group said about a dozen public health websites, some of which had been online since the 1990s, were pulled from the internet late last month after Trump’s executive order.

Some of the information removed from the CDC’s “Youth Risk Behavioral Surveillance System” is important for understanding the mental health challenges they face, Doctors for America said in a court filing. Other online resources included datasets from the CDC’s “Social Vulnerability Index,” which identifies communities with greater barriers to health access; HIV monitoring; and the National Assisted Reproductive Technologies Surveillance System, a database used by fertility experts to track nationwide success rates from procedures such as in vitro fertilization.

On Thursday, the doctors group and a Justice Department lawyer representing the health agencies agreed to restore additional data that had been removed or modified by Friday, according to a court filing.