by WorldTribune Staff, August 28, 2026 Non-AI Real World News

A newly released study by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) found a correlation between strong support for radical gender ideology and a higher justification for political violence.

The HHS study of 1,200 American adults, titled “Where the Clinic Meets the Movement: Does Gender Ideology Arm Left-Wing Authoritarian Psychology?”, found that respondents who backed the trans movement were more likely to say political violence could be justified in certain scenarios.

“This study raises important questions about what happens when ideology is given the authority of medicine,” said HHS Assistant Secretary Adm. Brian Christine. “The association between sex-rejecting clinical beliefs, authoritarian attitudes, and the justification of political violence warrant serious scientific scrutiny. HHS will continue to pursue rigorous research that examines these relationships and gives the American people the evidence they deserve.”

To conduct the HHS-commissioned study, researchers from Rutgers University, the Manhattan Institute, and the Network Contagion Research Institute developed a Clinical Gender Affirmation Scale (CGAS) based on positions derived from guidance issued by the American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association, World Professional Association for Transgender Health, and American Academy of Pediatrics.

The study states:

Across preregistered analyses, CGAS and related gender ideological-belief measures were strongly associated with left-wing authoritarianism (LWA), with Spearman correlations ranging from ρ = 0.44 to ρ = 0.59. CGAS also significantly predicted LWA, accounting for 31.5% of its variance. In ordinal regressions predicting CGAS, political identity was the strongest predictor, but LWA remained an independent predictor after controlling for political identity and age. LWA and CGAS were also positively associated with justification of political violence across six targets: killing Charlie Kirk, killing Donald Trump, killing Brian Thompson, arson of ICE buildings, damaging wealthy people’s property, and violence against police. Both independently predicted all six violence outcomes after controlling for left-wing political identity.

These findings suggest that gender ideology is associated with LWA and willingness to justify political violence.

The scale measured endorsement of five positions related to “transgender identity,” names and pronouns, and parental support.

According to the study, people who scored higher on left-wing authoritarianism were substantially more likely to consider political violence justified. That relationship remained after researchers accounted for how politically left-wing respondents identified.

The study also found that people who more strongly endorsed the sex-rejecting positions measured by the CGAS were more likely to justify political violence, even after accounting for political identity. That association was generally weaker than the relationship between left-wing authoritarianism and justification of political violence.

The authors propose that sex-rejecting beliefs may function as an ideological framework through which left-wing authoritarian tendencies become focused on specific perceived threats, outgroups, and forms of institutional action. They further propose that clinical and professional institutions may lend authority to a framework that identifies victims, sources of harm and responses to that harm, potentially providing people already disposed toward authoritarianism with moral justification for coercive or punitive action.

Colin Wright, a researcher for the study, told the New York Post: “One of our study’s most interesting and perhaps shocking findings was that accepting gender ideology appeared to augment authoritarian attitudes on support for political violence. We believe this may result from gender ideology defining specific oppressed classes and their oppressors, and the promotion of extreme narratives of harm for those who refuse to affirm transgender identities both socially and medically. That is only speculative at this point, but we are addressing this directly in a follow-up report.”

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  HHS study finds gender radicals more likely to support political violence, WorldTribune.com