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On Thursday, six senators, including Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville, signed a letter to the director of the National Institutes of Health accusing the agency of funding researchers who are “withholding the results of their research.”
During an interview with The New York Times this past October, Johanna Olson-Kennedy, a physician overseeing a study on the efficacy of puberty blockers for transgender minors, explained the delay in releasing official data by saying the team did “not want our work to be weaponized.” However, she reiterated that they do plan to release the results, but the study “has to be exactly on point, clear and concise. And that takes time.”
Over the last couple of years, gender-affirming care, especially for minors, has repeatedly come under fire from conservatives. So far, 26 states, including Alabama, have passed restrictions on healthcare for trans kids.
One bill that will soon be pre-filed for Alabama’s 2025 Legislative Session would make the window of time for people to sue over gender-affirming care provided to minors over seven times longer than the normal limit. The proposed legislation’s sponsor, state Sen. Arthur Orr, R-Decatur, told the Alabama Daily News that it is meant as a backup in case the state’s current ban on gender-affirming care is struck down.
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments last week in the lawsuit over Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors. In Alabama, Attorney General Steve Marshall’s statement on the case is: “kids suffering from gender dysphoria deserve so much better than hormones and surgeries.”
The senator’s letter, and previous statements, have also pointed to the “potential health impact” and argue that minors are unable to properly consent to gender-affirming care. (In order for minors to receive such treatment, it almost always requires the informed consent of their parents, as would any medical treatment for children.)
However, contrary to statements from Marshall and the senators, another paper that was part of the research project, the senator’s letter criticized “showed improvements in psychosocial functioning across two years of [gender-affirming hormones] treatment.” Many other studies, including ones not funded by the NIH, have found similar results.
While the letter Tuberville has recently signed calls for data to be made public and quotes a researcher saying that, “It’s really important to get the science out there,” he is not a consistent supporter of research on gender-affirming care for minors.
In 2023, he cosponsored a bill to ban all federal funding for such research, the “Protecting Our Kids from Harmful Research Act.” According to the press release announcing that fact, the bill was aimed at the same exact research program as last week’s letter.
Tuberville has also been a vocal opponent of gender-affirming care and perceived “wokeness” in the media and in his oft-combative social media missives.
On Sunday, he criticized the official HHS account on X posting that “everyone deserves to feel seen, respected and supported—no matter who they love.” Tuberville used the post recognizing Pansexual and Panromantic Pride Day as a reason to call the Biden administration “nothing but activists…not public servants.”
Tuberville also posted a similar message on Nov. 15, writing that “the DoD under Joe Biden has been more worried about gender transition surgeries and pronouns than creating a killing machine.”
Alabama’s senior senator has been worried about transgender people serving in the military for a while. In July, he accused wokeness of lowering recruitment rates. (He listed access to abortion and gender-affirming care as examples of wokeness.) More recently, Tuberville touted a clause in the proposed National Defense Authorization Act that would prevent taxpayer money from covering gender-affirming surgeries for service members as a conservative coup.
The letter to the NIH director requests they provide all of the annual progress reports on the research project “no later than December 19, 2024.”
