Two Harvard Medical School Professors Sue Trump Admin for Removing Research That Mentioned LGBTQ Health

Two Harvard Medical School professors sued the Trump administration Wednesday afternoon for removing their research from a government-run website for including terms recently banned by the administration, alleging the removals violated their First Amendment rights and the Administrative Procedure Act.

An agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services took down HMS professors Celeste S. Royce and Gordon D. Schiff’s articles in January from the Patient Safety Network, a government site which provides patient safety resources. The agency cited the articles’ inclusion of forbidden terms, including “LGBTQ” and “transgender,” and stated that it would only republish the articles if the physicians remove the censored terms.

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality removed the research to comply with guidance issued on Jan. 29 by the Office of Personnel Management, which directed agencies to remove “all outward facing media” that “inculcate or promote gender ideology.” The OPM’s directive was made to implement a Jan. 20 executive order by President Donald Trump.

Royce and Schiff’s research did not primarily deal with LGBTQ and transgender issues.

Schiff’s article examined suicide risk assessment and noted several “high risk groups,” a list which included LGBTQ individuals among multiple other demographics. And Royce’s paper was about endometriosis, a condition in which tissue similar to the uterine lining grows outside the uterus, and included a sentence about how the disease “can occur in trans and non-gender-conforming people.”

In the lawsuit — which names the OPM, HHS, AHRQ, and their leaders as defendants — the HMS professors claimed that the AHRQ’s actions violated their First Amendment rights and the APA, which governs how federal agencies can create regulations and specifically bars them from taking actions that are “arbitrary or capricious.”

Rachel Davidson, an attorney from the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts who is representing the plaintiffs, said in an interview with The Crimson that “the First Amendment is incredibly important when it comes to scientific inquiry and scientific debate and academic freedom and medical and scientific research.”

“It’s incredibly important for our society that the government has absolutely no business dictating which scientific facts can be discussed or debated or covered in research,” Davidson said.

The plaintiffs argued that the governments’ actions imposed “a viewpoint-based and unreasonable restriction” on their speech. They also claimed that the OPM guidance was “arbitrary and capricious” and fell outside the agency’s authority.

“That the current administration felt that they should be able to limit people’s accessing of information, of accurate information, really felt like an injustice to me,” Royce said.

The lawsuit calls for the OPM directive, and the AHRQ’s implementation of the order, to be ruled unconstitutional and their actions regarding “gender ideology” to be ceased immediately.

Royce and Schiff are represented by the ACLU, the ACLU of Massachusetts, and the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School. The suit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts.

The lawsuit comes as Trump turns up the heat on research and higher education. Last Friday, his administration withheld $400 million in federal funding from Columbia University over its handling of antisemitism on campus.

Over the last week, Harvard has started cutting costs to insulate its finances in the face of costly measures proposed by the Trump administration and Congress, such as an endowment tax or slashes to the University’s federal funding.

Some professors have urged Harvard to take a more aggressive stance against Republicans’ proposals. Government professor Ryan D. Enos said in an interview on Tuesday that Harvard must “stand up and push back” against Trump.

So far, University leaders have sharply criticized threats to research funding but have not censured the Trump administration by name.

Royce said she felt called to resist Trump’s attacks on scientific research and that the removal of her paper “felt like it was preventing me from doing my job as an educator, but also preventing future and current physicians from learning how to think.”

“If we don’t step up, in my opinion, we’re not doing our job,” Royce added.

—Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at william.mao@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @williamcmao.

—Staff writer Veronica H. Paulus can be reached at veronica.paulus@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @VeronicaHPaulus.