This reporting originally appeared in the Accountability Journalism Institute’s Important Context newsletter.
The Department of Health and Human Services is now using language invented by a conservative Catholic think tank to describe transgender healthcare—and the group that coined the term is thrilled about it.
WHAT’S GOING ON: HHS has been referring to gender-affirming care as “sex-rejecting procedures” in official press releases since November. The term appears nowhere in medical literature. It was created by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a right-wing organization the Southern Poverty Law Center has identified as part of an anti-LGBTQIA+ pseudoscience network.
“We are very pleased that the Department of Health and Human Services has adopted our language,” EPPC said in a statement to Important Context, calling the terminology a reflection of “biological truth.”
THE DETAILS: EPPC pushed for this exact outcome. Last April, the group submitted a public comment to HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. explicitly urging the department to adopt “sex-rejecting procedures.” The following month, they published a report arguing that the medically accepted term “gender-affirming care” was “biased in favor of gender ideology.”
And who exactly is EPPC? Founded in 1976 to promote “Judeo-Christian values” in law and politics, the group sat on the advisory board for Project 2025—the Heritage Foundation’s far-right policy roadmap that’s been guiding Trump administration actions. Its board includes Leonard Leo, the right-wing legal activist who helped remake the Supreme Court, and Robert George, a leading Christian right voice.
The money tells the story too: Leo’s The 85 Fund funneled $5.3 million to EPPC between 2020 and 2024. The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation gave $1.8 million. The Sarah Scaife Foundation contributed nearly $1.9 million.
OF COURSE: “Sex-rejecting procedures” isn’t the only Christian Right terminology HHS has adopted. The department also uses “gender ideology”—a phrase that traces back to Catholic conservatives in the 1990s—to describe the basic recognition that transgender people exist.
Meanwhile, the actual medical consensus recognizes transgender and non-binary identities as legitimate. The American Medical Association has stated that “trans and non-binary gender identities are normal variations of human identity and expression.”
WHY IT MATTERS: Secretary Kennedy claims he’s restoring “evidence-based” science at HHS. But adopting propaganda terms from religious activists isn’t science—it’s ideology dressed up in government letterhead. This language shift is part of a broader campaign targeting transgender Americans that genocide scholars warned last month meets the criteria of early genocidal processes.
The transgender population already faces higher rates of suicidality than the general population, and research suggests anti-trans policies make it worse. Now the federal health agency charged with protecting Americans is using language designed to delegitimize their very existence—language written by groups whose explicit mission is to impose their religious beliefs on public policy.