In late 2020, England’s National Health Service commissioned noted pediatrician Dr. Hilary Cass to review its gender care practices for young people. After nearly four years of intense study, the final report concluded that medicalized transition has little to no demonstrated benefit. As England and other European countries found growing evidence that these procedures do more harm than good, some American states joined the trend by passing laws against these procedures for minors.

Now our federal government may be taking notice. Since his inauguration, President Donald Trump has signed a series of executive orders that respect biological reality in areas from medicine to sports to intimate spaces, and protect the right to speak about the harms of gender ideology. These orders, including the most recent one, issued February 5, honor honest scientific inquiry and reverse the trend of activists distorting the scientific picture.

An early activist success was the 2015 removal of important scientist Dr. Kenneth Zucker as head of Toronto’s Gender Identity Service, which he cofounded. His sins included publishing research showing that most children who wanted to transition changed their minds before adulthood, and his preference for trying psychotherapy before hormones.

In 2018 activists attacked Dr. Lisa Littman’s scientific publication describing “rapid-onset gender dysphoria” (ROGD)—a syndrome in which emotionally vulnerable young people become persuaded they are transgender despite not having struggled with gender issues before the recent past. Littman believes that ROGD is transmitted socially, through peer groups and social media. This could explain the astronomical rise in transgender-identified adolescents seeking medicalized gender transition over the past 15 years.

Activists correctly worried that Littman’s study was bad for their cause and tried to censor it. Ultimately, Dr. Littman lost her consulting job with the Rhode Island Department of Health, and her academic affiliation with Brown University was not renewed.

In 2023, it was my turn. I have been a professor of psychology at Northwestern University for 35 years and a researcher for over 40. I’ve studied many controversial topics, including sexual orientation and gender identity. Activists of all stripes have attacked my work, but I’d never been censored until 2023.

That year, I published an article titled “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria: Parent Reports on 1,655 Possible Cases” in the prestigious Archives of Sexual Behavior. The article confirmed Dr. Littman’s basic findings with a much larger sample and also contributed some novel, disturbing findings.

For example, my article concluded that the strongest predictor of whether a child had undergone social or medical transition was having a gender specialist. Parents with that experience believed the specialist pressured them towards transitioning their child. Among the adolescent and young adult children, those with the most pre-existing mental health problems were most likely to have transitioned.

Activists erupted yet again, attacking both the article and the editor who accepted it. Under this pressure, the journal retracted the article.

In addition to censoring sound research, activists bury their own work when it doesn’t support medicalized transition. Case in point: Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy, who leads the largest NIH-funded study on puberty blockers, admitted to not publishing data showing puberty blockers did not improve mental health to avoid the political consequences of that finding. No transgender activist complained.

In her final report, Dr. Cass noted this trend of sloppy, activist-driven research. “There are few other areas of healthcare where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views, where people are vilified on social media, and where name-calling echoes the worst bullying behavior,” she wrote. “This must stop.”

It hasn’t stopped, and real lives are at stake. Dr. Littman’s most recent research highlights the experience of “detransitioners”—people who permanently altered their bodies as adolescents and came to regret it. Detransitioners recently submitted a friend-of-the-court brief to the U.S. Supreme Court, and their stories are harrowing. In one case, a young woman was rushed into a double mastectomy at a gender clinic, where pools of blood began to accumulate in her breasts, and the clinicians dismissed her concerns. She was forced to drive to the emergency room, where she had to be drained several times over the next week.

Does this sound like research-based medical care? This is what detransitioners around the world are trying to warn us about.

We owe our children better research and better care, not political social media slogans that doom children into a lifetime of unnecessary medical treatment. Hopefully, the recent executive orders are the first volley of good news that our federal government is returning to follow the science no matter where it might lead.

J. Michael Bailey is a professor of psychology at Northwestern University.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.