It’s more than a little concerning that we’ve reached a point where this wasn’t even editorialising on my part - prestigious, big name journals like The Lancet consider it necessary and accurate...
It’s more than a little concerning that we’ve reached a point where this wasn’t even editorialising on my part - prestigious, big name journals like The Lancet consider it necessary and accurate to publish articles with titles like this now.
A US Department of Veterans Affairs dataset compiling veteran health-care use in 2021 was quietly amended on March 5, 2025. A column titled gender was renamed sex, and the words were also switched in the dataset title and description (appendix p 1). Before March 5, the dataset had not been modified since it was published in 2022. As of May 1, the dataset change log, in which modifications should be tracked, is empty. The switch from gender to sex also occurred in other public health datasets, including US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) datasets tracking global adult tobacco consumption, stroke mortality data from 2015 to 2017, and a survey of nutrition, physical activity, and obesity (appendix pp 4–9). The agencies involved have not issued any statements confirming or explaining these changes, but they could be intended to comply with a Presidential directive for agencies to remove “messages that promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology”.
Public health researchers, scientists, and medical practitioners rely heavily on government datasets for research and clinical practice. Following a global trend towards an open government, the US 2019 OPEN Government Data Act empowered federal agencies to make datasets publicly available. The US Government's main data repository now hosts hundreds of thousands of datasets. Data manipulation by the US Government, particularly when hidden, is a crisis—it makes crucial datasets untrustworthy and unusable. If the US Government secretly changes datasets for political reasons, researchers relying on the data might erroneously recommend ineffective or counterproductive interventions. Further, such changes, when discovered, reduce trust in the data that underly public health and, consequently, health interventions. This reduction in trust hinders the progress of science, medicine, and public health, and reduces individual willingness to rely on expert recommendations. It is also a crisis for international researchers who depend on US Government datasets and data infrastructure. But there are potential solutions and actions that researchers around the world can take.
This is done in the shoddiest of ways too - basically search and replace. This has immense implications for anyone doing metaresearch/studies on conditions linked to sex. This is a sure-fire way...
The switch from gender to sex also occurred in other public health datasets, including US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) datasets tracking global adult tobacco consumption, stroke mortality data from 2015 to 2017, and a survey of nutrition, physical activity, and obesity (appendix pp 4–9).
[...]
We found that 114 (49%) of the 232 included datasets were substantially altered. Of these, the vast majority (106 datasets [93%]) had the word gender switched to sex (appendix p 2). Only 15 (13%) of the 114 altered datasets logged or otherwise indicated that the change had occurred.
This is done in the shoddiest of ways too - basically search and replace. This has immense implications for anyone doing metaresearch/studies on conditions linked to sex. This is a sure-fire way to demolish any goodwill in US public datasets, and it would be perfectly comprehensible if this had rippling effects into the far future, compromising the US' position as a global leader in research for many administrations to come.
I've had coworkers mention that US-based conferences basically begged them to come, as the number of European researchers willing to attend in-person conferences in the US has diminished significantly. I can't blame them - the ones that are going are instructed by their institutions to carry burner phones and minimal amounts of material.
Not only is performing research in the US becoming more difficult, they are retroactively sabotaging previous research, and preventing foreign scientists from participating in discussions.
A good friend of mine was flying to the US for a conference a few months back and there was a very distinct "oh shit" moment when I saw a headline about an academic on the way to a conference...
A good friend of mine was flying to the US for a conference a few months back and there was a very distinct "oh shit" moment when I saw a headline about an academic on the way to a conference getting pulled by ICE that same day. Happened to be someone on the way to a different conference this time around, but it could just as easily have been my friend, or me for that matter - I don't think there was anything fundamentally unusual that led to them being detained. And then a week later a student was grabbed off the street near her university by masked agents and flown out of state before a judge could intervene; which happened, by complete coincidence, at the same university my friend used to work at.
Yeah, US conferences really don't seem like a worthwhile risk right now...
It’s more than a little concerning that we’ve reached a point where this wasn’t even editorialising on my part - prestigious, big name journals like The Lancet consider it necessary and accurate to publish articles with titles like this now.
This is done in the shoddiest of ways too - basically search and replace. This has immense implications for anyone doing metaresearch/studies on conditions linked to sex. This is a sure-fire way to demolish any goodwill in US public datasets, and it would be perfectly comprehensible if this had rippling effects into the far future, compromising the US' position as a global leader in research for many administrations to come.
I've had coworkers mention that US-based conferences basically begged them to come, as the number of European researchers willing to attend in-person conferences in the US has diminished significantly. I can't blame them - the ones that are going are instructed by their institutions to carry burner phones and minimal amounts of material.
Not only is performing research in the US becoming more difficult, they are retroactively sabotaging previous research, and preventing foreign scientists from participating in discussions.
A good friend of mine was flying to the US for a conference a few months back and there was a very distinct "oh shit" moment when I saw a headline about an academic on the way to a conference getting pulled by ICE that same day. Happened to be someone on the way to a different conference this time around, but it could just as easily have been my friend, or me for that matter - I don't think there was anything fundamentally unusual that led to them being detained. And then a week later a student was grabbed off the street near her university by masked agents and flown out of state before a judge could intervene; which happened, by complete coincidence, at the same university my friend used to work at.
Yeah, US conferences really don't seem like a worthwhile risk right now...