Scientists who study LGBTQ+ communities are reeling after the National Institutes of Health canceled their funding, citing their focus on “transgender issues,” as the Trump administration cracks down on what it calls “gender ideology extremism.”
Late Friday, universities around the country received letters stating that the NIH was immediately terminating grants for research about the LGBTQ+ population — at least a half-dozen grants in total, according to letters reviewed by The Chronicle. Most of the letters specified “transgender issues” as a reason for cancellation, and all of them stated: “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. Many such studies ignore, rather than seriously examine, biological realities. It is the policy of NIH not to prioritize these research programs.”
The correspondence also stated: “NIH is obligated to carefully steward grant awards to ensure taxpayer dollars are used in ways that benefit the American people and improve their quality of life. Your project does not satisfy these criteria.”
At least six universities received such letters from institutes within the NIH: the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, the National Cancer Institute, and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The canceled grants had been most recently approved in 2023 and 2024, according to the letters.
Although the letters acknowledged that the NIH generally allows grantees to “take appropriate corrective action” before terminating grants, they declared that “no corrective action is possible here.”
Scientists were shocked and dismayed at the cancellations, which they said would derail, possibly permanently, projects that have been in the works for years. “It hurts my heart,” said Jason D. Flatt, an associate professor of social and behavioral health at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, who estimates that he’s had about $2 million in federal grants rescinded or canceled since President Trump took office. “I have to lay off people.”
Neither NIH spokespeople nor administrators who signed the letters returned requests for comment.
The notices went out the same day that Matthew J. Memoli, the acting head of the NIH, signed off on a memo listing “research activities that NIH no longer supports,” which included projects about diversity, equity, and inclusion in science and research at Chinese universities, in addition to transgender issues, The Washington Post reported Wednesday. Nature reported late Wednesday that “hundreds” more termination notices are on the way, citing anonymous NIH officials.
Trump’s second term has thrown the normally quiet and predictable grantmaking process into chaos, unnerving scientists and universities. The administration has proposed a 15-percent cap on indirect-cost funding from the NIH, which a federal judge has blocked. Inside the NIH, grant approval has slowed to a crawl. During most of February, the agency did not schedule the peer-review meetings essential for issuing new grants, leaving thousands of applications in limbo. This week, the agency signaled it was getting back to business by scheduling a handful of meetings.
At the same time, the administration is overhauling the federal government’s stance on sex and gender. Trump has issued executive orders to terminate diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and programs that “promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology.” The president has also sought to ban athletes who were born male from competing in women’s sports and wants to withhold federal funding from hospitals that provide gender-transition care to people under age 19, an effort blocked Tuesday by a preliminary injunction.
Two of Flatt’s NIH grants were canceled on February 28. One was for a study seeking to identify the prevalence of Alzheimer’s and related dementias among LGBTQ+ seniors. The other was for a national database connecting researchers with LGBTQ+ people who have Alzheimer’s, which Flatt was building with scientists at Emory University and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.
It was just the latest blow to Flatt’s work. Earlier in February, he’d had another grant canceled — this one by the Department of Defense, for a project about LGBTQ+ veterans with Alzheimer’s. The agency had informed him in a letter that his research “was not in line” with Trump’s executive order stating that male and female are the only two genders. Other researchers have also reported losing federal funding for LGBTQ+ research prior to the NIH’s communications last week.
Flatt expects that he will have to lay off much of his team, which consists of two full-time staff members, five graduate students, and an hourly student worker. He said he has some grants from foundations, but they are too small to make up for the loss. And he said he was flummoxed by the NIH’s claims that his research is not relevant to “the health of many Americans.” Data indicates that transgender people have dementia at higher rates than the rest of the population. “If we’re going to find a cure and also find effective resources and support,” he said, “it’s a view that will be more successful if we include everybody, but especially those that are being impacted more.”
For Flatt, excluding transgender people from his research was not an option. “I’ve spent a decade building trust with my community members to be able to do work like this,” he said. “I have to figure out a way to do it that still honors them, but somehow meets the requirements that the administration is putting out, and I really don’t know where those two meet. I do this because I want to improve people’s health — I am about the health of everybody.”
Flatt said he resigned last month from an NIH study section, which reviews grant applications, because an email told him that the sex, gender, race, or ethnicity of a potential study’s planned participants “should not be included in critiques and should not influence overall preliminary or final scores.”
Last year, the LGBTQ+ Policy Lab at Vanderbilt University, which studies the consequences of public policies on LGBTQ+ people, was recognized by the NIH for advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and access in health research. But the NIH has since taken down the webpage announcing that honor. And last week, Tara McKay, the lab’s director, learned that she was losing funding for a longitudinal study of older LGBTQ+ adults in the South. The project, which had received about $2.6 million in federal funding, provided granular data about a population that national studies often overlook, she said, and had been praised in the past by field experts and NIH staff alike.
The grant was in its sixth year, and under normal circumstances, McKay would have expected it to be renewed this year. But since January, McKay, an associate professor of medicine, health, and society, had been bracing for something like this to happen. “I was still surprised and sad and very upset about what it means for science, what it means for our trainees, what it means for my career, what it means for study participants, what it means for queer people over all in terms of the country — all the things,” she said.
Any interruption to a study like hers is irreversible, because the value of such a data set lies in its ability to show changes and trends over a long period, she said. “This is infrastructure we were building in order to extend and map things over time,” she said. “That kind of value is taken away over time when we’re not able to continue to add new data to this.”
McKay said that she was talking to Vanderbilt’s general counsel and outside researchers, trying to figure out what to do next. The letters she and others received state that grantees can appeal the NIH’s decision within 30 days. “I don’t know that it’s likely to be beneficial or if there’s even a path to resolution,” she said, “but I think it’s important for me personally and for our community to have it on record as being appealed.”
Until hearing from the NIH on Friday, Sean Arayasirikul, an associate professor in residence of health, society, and behavior at the University of California at Irvine, believed they had more than two years left on their grant to study HIV-prevention efforts among people who belong to racial, sexual, and gender minorities, such as Black and Latino trans women.
The cancellation will be a significant setback for their career, their trainees, and the people they study, Arayasirikul said. But they were more unsettled by the bigger-picture implications of the Trump administration’s actions.
“We could have a generation of scientists and science that is completely erasing trans folks, sexual and gender-minoritized communities,” Arayasirikul said. “That is really harmful.”
