Researchers Disguised a Trans-Focused Puberty Blocker Study to Regain NIH Funding, Warranting Investigation and Penalties
Source: Jane Robbins. "Doctors Lied To Keep Federal Money Flowing For Puberty Blockers." November 3, 2026. thefederalist.com
The Gist
The author says researchers running a government-funded puberty blocker study scrubbed words like 'transgender' from their paperwork after the Trump administration cut related grants, then got their money back. She argues this looks like deception of taxpayers that should be investigated and punished, and that this research should stop altogether.
Conclusion
Researchers on an NIH-funded puberty blocker study likely deceived the federal government by scrubbing references to transgender youth to regain funding, so the matter should be investigated, any grantees found to have defrauded taxpayers should be penalized, and research on puberty blockers for gender dysphoria should stop immediately.
Premises
- The NIH funded a 2021 study of puberty blockers' effects on the brains and mental health of trans-identifying children, and its stated purpose was to address health disparities for transgender youth.
- After the Trump administration cut DEI-related grants in January 2025, funding for this study lapsed in 2025 and then resumed in 2026 at roughly the same level (about $725,000 per year).
- In March 2025 the researchers told a federal grants supervisor that the study might conflict with administration priorities and promised to remove references to gender identity and recast the study as one about puberty blockers in general pediatric populations.
- The revised application deleted or replaced nearly all mentions of 'transgender' youth and of WPATH and the Endocrine Society, even though the study's design and purpose centered on trans-identifying children.
- The recast was therefore a cosmetic relabeling that concealed the study's continuing purpose, and it was so transparent that a good-faith NIH reviewer could not have been fooled, which suggests complicity by a politically sympathetic official.
- Misleading a federal agency to obtain a grant can amount to fraud, carrying funding sanctions and civil or criminal liability.
- Puberty blockers demonstrably harm healthy children, so research on them for gender dysphoria is unethical.
Assumptions
- The timing of resumed funding and the revisions indicates the revisions caused the funding to resume.
- Changes to the study's wording reflect a change in its real purpose, not a legitimate reframing of an unchanged design.
- A study cannot be both about trans-identifying youth and about puberty blockers in broader populations.
- NIH officials who approved the revised study must have acted from shared ideology, not from good-faith judgment or administrative routine.
- Dr. Laidlaw's interpretation of the documents is reliable despite his known advocacy against pediatric gender medicine.
- Puberty blockers harm children being treated for gender dysphoria, and this is established enough to justify halting all research.
- The researchers' revised statements are false, not merely a different framing of a study that really covers a wider population.