American College of Physicians Goes All-In on Radical Political Activism

In November 2025, the American College of Physicians (ACP) published its most recent “policy compendium” showing the particular policy positions for which the ACP is advocating.

The compendium is rife with endorsements of discriminatory practices, as well as gender ideology, and represents a radical streak within the ACP’s mission. 

Indeed, one section of the compendium is devoted entirely to DEI initiatives, with the justification that a “diverse, equitable, and inclusive physician workforce is crucial to promote equity and understanding among clinicians and patients and to facilitate quality care […].”

In short, the ACP is promoting radical identity politics and racial discrimination to the detriment of clinical excellence and patient care.

Key Takeaways

Racial Discrimination in Admissions

Several of the ACP’s policy positions explicitly call for racial discrimination in medical school and healthcare education admissions:

• “Medical and other health professional schools should revitalize and bolster efforts to improve matriculation and graduation rates of racial and ethnic minority students.”
• “Institutions of higher education should appropriately consider a person’s race and ethnicity as one factor in determining admission in order to counter the impact of current discriminatory practices and the legacy of past discrimination practices and better reflect the current composition of the population.” 
• “Programs that provide outreach to encourage racial and ethnic minority enrollment in medical and other health professional schools should be maintained, reinstated, and expanded, including diversity/ minority affairs offices, scholarships, and other financial aid programs.” 

Needless to say, prioritizing race and ethnicity for enrollment and academic progress is textbook racial discrimination, regardless of the justification for it. Were the ACP’s policy proposals to be implemented, medical schools would reject many qualified candidates who have the rigor and dedication to attend medical school in favor of those who tick the correct racial boxes. This obviously harms the future physician pool, leading to downstream negative effects on patient care.

Racial Discrimination in Healthcare

The ACP’s endorsement of racial discrimination also extends outside of the medical education context to healthcare more broadly:

• “All arenas of the health care workforce should be incentivized to implement evidence-based best practices in the recruitment, retention, and advancement of health professionals of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and other persons affected by discrimination.”
• “Developing a hiring diversity strategy to recruit racial and ethnic minority candidates by drafting open job descriptions, broadly advertising open positions outside of traditional venues, better understanding the pathway of diverse talent, and conducting outreach to develop more relationships with diverse candidates.”
• “Implementing health care career pathway programs to engage and connect Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and other students affected by discrimination and expose them to and advance their readiness for careers in medicine.” 

Hiring and recruiting should, especially in the medical context, be about selecting the best candidate for the job. The stakes of healthcare are significantly higher than other domains, and it is irresponsible (and obviously unfair and unethical) to implement a “hiring diversity strategy” that sacrifices merit at the altar of identity politics.

When the best candidate is hired, regardless of race, it is patients who win. 

Endorsement of Sex-Denying Interventions on Minors

Moreover, in December 2025 the ACP sent a letter to Congress, alongside several other medical associations including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists, and the American Psychiatric Association, expressing its endorsement of child sex change interventions.

“Health care for transgender young people is individualized, age-appropriate, provided according to longstanding expert clinical guidelines, and supported by leading American medical organizations,” the letter states.

This ignores the volume of evidence demonstrating the harms of so-called “gender-affirming care” and the comparative lack of support for these interventions. The Department of Health and Human Services in 2025 published a comprehensive review of the evidence behind sex-denying interventions for minors and found there to be insufficient evidence to support these practices, while the United Kingdom’s Cass Review found “remarkably weak evidence” to support the use of puberty blockers and hormone treatments for minors.

And for the record, the last claim has a significant caveat: the American Society of Plastic Surgeons has now come out against sex-denying surgeries for minors.

All told, these policy positions demonstrate just how determined the ACP is to advance discriminatory, divisive ideology.

This is unbecoming of a medical association, and indicates a derogation of the ACP’s fundamental duty to work to advance the health of patients everywhere.