After Trump's inauguration, a dramatic halt to LGBTQ+ research

WASHINGTON — Four months ago, Tara McKay, an associate professor at Vanderbilt University, received an award from the National Institutes of Health recognizing her contributions to the field of LGBTQ+ health research.

After President Donald Trump was inaugurated, the office that gave her that award — the Sexual and Gender Minority Research Office — was closed.

And over the last week, grants that McKay and other researchers had through the NIH to study LGBTQ+ health have been canceled, with researchers told via email that their work’s inclusion of trans people conflicted with “agency priorities.”

The dramatic shift reflects how quickly the world’s largest funder of biomedical research went from supporting and even trying to increase research into LGBTQ+ health to canceling funding for it based on the change of presidential administration.

During the first Trump administration, there was little interference with what the NIH would fund or what areas it would prioritize.

But the cancellation of grants over ideological differences between the administration, scientists and the medical establishment reflects a new era for the storied agency which has contributed to scientific advances from the Human Genome Project to mRNA vaccines.

What will be lost is research that will help LGBTQ+ people live healthier lives, said McKay, director and co-founder of the LGBTQ+ Policy Lab at Vanderbilt.

“Everyone I know and work with is expecting this letter to come to their inbox,” said McKay, whose grant was related to studying the effects of social networks on LGBTQ+ health disparities.

Her study surveyed the same people over multiple years and collected blood and DNA biomarkers from participants to study the effects of discrimination at the molecular level.

“Our study tries to provide new information and to take a deeper dive on what’s driving well-documented disparities,” McKay said.

“You need to understand the mechanisms to develop effective interventions,” she said. “Not having this information is a major loss to the field.”

A reversal in policy

The shift is a sharp departure from the past decade, when the NIH began intentionally funding research into LGBTQ+ health — or what researchers call “sexual and gender minority” health.

In 2015, the NIH’s Sexual and Gender Minority Research Office was created to coordinate grants related to LGBTQ+ health across the agency’s 27 institutes and centers.

The office survived — and even thrived — through an entire Trump administration, but was one of the first cuts made afterTrump’s January executive order on “gender ideology,” which included a ban on related federal funding.

In 2016, NIH designated sexual and gender minorities as a health disparity population. The designation was intended to promote research on health disparities faced by LGBTQ+ people.

Over the past week, several researchers have lost their R01 grants — career-defining grants through the NIH that are extremely difficult to get and must go through several levels of review, including approval by peers in the field, before potentially getting funded.

While funding for those grants can last several years, researchers have to submit annual reports detailing their progress and receive approval for the project to continue.

It’s very unusual for NIH to just cancel a grant, except in cases of fraud, researchers say.

“NIH is going back on their contractual obligations to us. I have never heard of this before, and I’ve been around for a second,” said Whitney L. Wharton, an Atlanta-based researcher who had a grant canceled by the NIH because the research involved trans people. “It’s literally a 180. There was no warning, other than the writing on the wall, politically,” Wharton said.

Over the past week, researchers such as Wharton have received nearly identical form letters informing them that their grant “no longer effectuates agency priorities.”

It included language researchers say is offensive: “research programs based on gender identity are often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment, and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans.”

Impacted research

Most of the projects that have been canceled haven’t focused on trans people specifically, but have included them under the broader umbrella of LGBTQ+ research.

There are nearly 150 active projects categorized under the now-shuttered Sexual and Gender Minority Research Office, according to an NIH website, though that includes projects that have been canceled.

Many of those projects focused on mental health, substance use, infectious diseases or aging in the LGBTQ+ population. It’s well-known in scientific research that LGBTQ+ people can experience different health outcomes, including early cognitive aging and decline, potentially because of chronic stress and other factors during their lifetime.

The cancellations come at a crucial time for LGBTQ+ research. More than 22% of Generation Z and nearly 10% of millennials identify as LGBTQ+, according to a 2024 Gallup poll. About 0.9% of the entire population is trans, according to the poll.

Wharton’s project aimed to connect people in the LGBTQ+ community with resources related to aging and caregiving; it also created a database of LGBTQ+ people interested in Alzheimer’s clinical trials that other researchers could pull from to increase diversity in their research.

“It’s really hard to get individuals from under-resourced groups into clinical trials,” Wharton said, but it’s important work. LGBTQ+ people can be more likely to experience cognitive issues as they age and also face barriers accessing resources.

Some question whether the terminations are legal. Several federal judges have already issued preliminary injunctions against the Trump administration’s pauses on federal funding.

Jace Flatt, an associate professor at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has had two NIH grants and one Department of Defense grant canceled for including trans people in the research, including the project they worked on with Wharton.

Another project focused on LGBTQ+ caregivers, including those caring for someone with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia, who are often missing from research into caregivers.

“It absolutely will create a huge gap in the knowledge we will have,” said Flatt, who said they will continue doing the work, but it will have to be at a smaller scale.

Another concern is the impact on the next generation of researchers looking at LGBTQ+ health issues.

“I’m training graduate students. There’s going to be nothing for them as they launch their careers,” Flatt said.