The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in the United States removed or redacted references to transgender, gender identity from its website Friday in an effort to meet a deadline imposed by the federal Office of Personnel Management after Donald Trump.
In addition, CDC officials confirmed that they were given a list of about 20 words and phrases that should no longer be used, including “gender,” “transgender,” “non-binary,” “assigned sex at birth,” and all terms related to inclusion and diversity.
Prior to the removal of the material, a search of the CDC’s website yielded more than 2,200 documents, studies and guidelines related to trans people, 490 referencing the LGBTQ+ community in general, and more than 6,000 files containing the word “equality.” Much of these documents related to preventing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases and studied access to health services for different communities.
The mandate for the changes came from the Federal Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which on Wednesday issued guidelines requiring the termination of “all federal programs that use taxpayer money to promote or reflect gender ideology.” The OPM document was obtained by The Washington Post and is part of a broader effort by Trump to repeal policies related to inclusion and diversity in the civil service.
According to OPM, federal agencies are required to remove all relevant reports from their websites and discontinue any program or funding related to the issue. CDC officials were instructed to contact scientific journals and withdraw studies that had already been accepted for publication but not yet released if they contained references to gender issues that did not comply with Trump’s executive order.
The order for the changes also extended to internal communications for CDC employees. It was revealed that on Friday morning they were informed that they were no longer allowed to use pronouns in their signatures on official emails and were given a deadline to remove them by the end of last Friday.
Meanwhile, other agencies, such as the National Institute of Health (NIH), were instructed to limit the gender options in clinical data to “male” and “female” only.
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