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‘FALSE’: New Study Challenges Claim That Laws Restricting Transgender Medicine Increase Teen Suicide

The medical watchdog group Do No Harm published a study Thursday countering the claim that laws restricting sex-rejecting procedures, often euphemistically described as “gender-affirming care,” lead to increased suicide rates among young people with gender dysphoria.

“When we examined the widely cited claim that restricting pediatric sex-rejecting procedures will spike suicide rates, we found it rests on a mass of shoddy and dishonest research,” Ian Kingsbury, senior director of Do No Harm’s Center for Accountability in Medicine, told the Daily Signal in a statement Thursday.

Read more at the Daily Signal.

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We ran the data on trans teen suicide panic — and found the claims are misleading

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“You can choose between a live son or a dead daughter.”

Countless parents have heard some variation of these words — from physicians, medical associations, media outlets or online activists.

If children believe they’re born in the wrong body and can’t get sex-change treatments, the argument goes, they’re at high risk of committing suicide.

No claim has swayed more parents to let their kids get puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and even surgeries.

The same claim has struck fear into the hearts of lawmakers considering restrictions on such treatments.

But as we show in a new report, the suicide threat isn’t true.

Read more at the New York Post.

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Report finds most MD programs still maintain DEI initiatives

A majority of MD-granting medical schools maintain diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices, a new report has found.

The report, which was published on Aug. 31 by Do No Harm, is tied to the conservative watchdog’s Medical School Excellence Index, which was launched in September 2025.

The index measures medical schools’ “institutional commitment to DEI ideology” as well as admissions quality and student performance transparency. Schools received lower grades for maintaining DEI offices and for including DEI language in their mission statements.

This year’s findings reveal that 62% of American allopathic medical schools continue to have DEI offices. The organization’s report summarizing its findings criticizes schools with DEI commitments for elevating ideology over merit and excellence.

Read more at Campus Reform.

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Medical student research is low quality but spreads nonetheless, study finds

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Published research by medical students continues to proliferate despite concerns about the quality of the work, according to a new report.

“Why Johnny Can’t Stop Writing: The Boom in Low-Impact, Politicized Medical Student Research,” authored by Do No Harm’s Jay Greene, highlights the proliferation of low-quality medical student research in the past 20 years. The researcher offered potential solutions in original comments sent to The College Fix.

Greene found that in the early 2000s, fewer than 12 publications listed students as authors or co-authors, but in the 2020s, more than 700 publications could claim medical student authorship.

Read more at the College Fix.

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How Trump administration threats could affect medical school admissions

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The Trump administration’s mounting investigations and attacks on diversity initiatives have left medical schools facing a tough choice as they consider how to select incoming classes: stick with policies they see as core to their mission or risk critical federal funding.

The legal landscape is unresolved, leaving some schools to weigh potential consequences in a high-profile, high-stakes fight.

[…]

“Every data point that we see speaks to continued and really pervasive discrimination within medical school admissions,” said Ian Kingsbury, senior director of the Center for Accountability in Medicine, a project of Do No Harm. The group, which advocates against what it calls identity politics in medicine, has questioned the science behind the idea that health outcomes are improved when patients are treated by doctors of the same race. In an email, he added that he applauds the effort to bring colleges and universities into compliance with federal civil rights laws. “As Pres. Reagan famously quipped, ‘When you can’t make them see the light, make them feel the heat.’”

Read more at the Washington Post.

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340B was built for patients, not hospital profit margins

America’s hospitals are supposed to be places where politics take a back seat to patient care.

But there is a growing question Tennesseans should be asking: When Washington gives hospitals a special federal benefit intended to help vulnerable patients, do taxpayers know where that money actually goes?

A recent op-ed in The Tennessean rightly highlighted the precarious nature of rural health care, but it missed a critical systemic issue: how a vital federal safety-net program – 340B – is being exploited by hospitals at the expense of the vulnerable people it was built to protect.

Read more in the [Nashville] Tennessean.

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Your toothache doesn’t care about DEI. Dental education just proved it

Dental education has taken an important step back toward first principles.

This summer, the Commission on Dental Accreditation, the body entrusted with establishing accreditation standards for dental education across the country, did what it needed to do, moving beyond temporarily suspending several of its diversity, equity, and inclusion requirements to removing them from the accreditation framework altogether.

Read more at the Washington Examiner.

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Official: Colorado can’t finance gender-changing procedures

A recent ruling from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is forcing states, including Colorado, to prohibit the use of federal Medicaid funds and certain children’s health insurance programs for “sex-rejecting” procedures on minors.

[…]

According to a database from an organization called Do No Harm, which was started by Dr. Stanley Goldfarb in 2022, the number of minors who received gender or sex-related care in Colorado was nearly 300. It also shows that 60 of them have been impacted specifically by sex-rejecting surgeries. These numbers are from 2019 to 2023.

Dr. Kurt Miceli, the chief medical officer for Do No Harm, told The Center Square that this number was “likely an underestimate.”

Read more at the Center Square.

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Why The South Could Become The Next Center Of Medical Education

The South appears poised to become the new center of medical education across the country as the battle over diversity, equity, and inclusion continues to rage through academia.

Watchdog organization Do No Harm released its second annual ranking of medical schools on Thursday, evaluating schools based on their embrace of merit-based standards versus DEI. The ranking, first shared with The Daily Wire, shows medical schools in states with stringent DEI bans differentiating themselves from states that have identity politics embedded in their education systems.

Read more at Daily Wire.

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University of Illinois medical school rebrands DEI office as ‘Advocacy and Engagement’

The University of Illinois (UI) College of Medicine in Chicago renamed its Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion office the Office of Advocacy and Engagement in 2026 while retaining the same director and four listed staff members.

The office’s current website continues to link to several initiatives and resources that appeared under its previous structure.

Do No Harm reported that, as recently as May 24, the office’s homepage stated that the College of Medicine aimed to “develop and implement a diversity, equity and inclusion framework” coordinating efforts across the college.

Read more at Campus Reform.

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Colorado School of Public Health paid ‘queer’ youth to attend ‘LGBTQ+’ sessions

The Colorado School of Public Health paid “queer” children to attend “LGBTQ+ group sessions,” according to a new Do No Harm report based on internal documents.

Do No Harm, a conservative watchdog organization, published its report, titled “The Colorado ‘Gender-Affirming’ Pipeline,” on Aug. 10.

The School of Public Health operated Colorado’s Queer Youth Network (CQYN) during 2023 and 2024, according to records discovered by the organization. Children who participated were paid $40 per Zoom session.

The report explains that the program regularly promoted “gender ideology.”

Read more at Campus Reform.

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NIH-Funded Study Finds Puberty Blockers Failed to Improve Youth Mental Health

A taxpayer-funded study of children and young adults taking puberty blockers and hormone treatments found no improvement in youth mental health.

The Oversight Project, a watchdog group, obtained the final report of “The Impact of Early Medical Treatment in Transgender Youth” and shared it with the Daily Signal.

[…]

“The argument has been that this improves mental health,” Dr. Kurt Miceli, the chief medical officer at Do No Harm, which opposes gender changes for children, said. “ … The narrative by advocates has been that this is lifesaving treatment.”

He noted that a separate 2023 New England Journal of Medicine article referenced two minors observed in a study who committed suicide.

The recently released study noted that “Denominator for retention (expected visits) does not include participants who withdrew consent, passed away, or have not reached the end of their extended follow-up window.” But it does not say how the youths “passed away,” Miceli noted.

“Two suicides were reported in a previous study, but downplayed,” Miceli said. “It’s important for science and important to patients to know.”

Read more at Daily Signal.

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HHS Responds to Democrat’s Head-Scratching Defense of Transgender ‘Medicine’

The Department of Health and Human Services pushed back after Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat nominee for U.S. Senate in Michigan, compared transgender medical procedures to circumcision.

HHS under President Donald Trump published a comprehensive peer-reviewed study finding “extremely weak evidence” for any benefits from sex-rejecting procedures in pursuit of a transgender identity. The agency has also investigated allegedly false medical billing for experimental transgender medical procedures, which supporters call “gender-affirming care.”

[…]

Do No Harm, a medical watchdog, also condemned the circumcision comparison.

“The suggestion that circumcision in any way is equitable to or justifies transgender surgeries on minors is a weak and dishonest attempt to muddy the waters on a politically toxic issue,” Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, a nephrologist who serves as Do No Harm’s chairman, told the Daily Signal in a statement Tuesday.

Read more at Daily Signal.

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No, slavery does not explain black-white health disparities

The latest paper linking poor health outcomes in black Americans to past racial injustices has come under scrutiny from independent experts.

“Historical slavery predicts contemporary disparities in mortality between Black and White Americans,” claims a paper this summer in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The authors argue “[c]ounties with greater reliance on slavery in 1860 have higher contemporary mortality rates for Black Americans but lower rates for White Americans.”

Researchers, led by University of California Berkeley Professor Manuel Galvan, did not look at the actual number of slaves. Rather, they used the “cotton suitability” of soil as a proxy.

This is one of the key issues with the study, however, according to experts from Do No Harm.

Read more at the College Fix.

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Bill Seeks to Block Taxpayer Funding for Gender Transition Research on Minors

A congressional bill is attempting to stop taxpayer money from researching or publishing material that promotes gender transition procedures for minors.

U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), along with U.S. Senators Mike Lee (R-UT) and James Lankford (R-OK), introduced the Protecting Our Kids from Harmful Research Act.

[…]

From 2019 to 2023, health care providers performed gender transition procedures on almost 14,000 children, according to Do No Harm, a nonprofit medical advocacy group.

Read more at the Tennessee Star.

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CDC Recognizes Detransitioning As Official Condition, Opens Door To Medical Treatment For Mutilated Kids

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in October will start recognizing detransitioning — reversing gender “transition” mutilation — in official diagnosis codes for purposes of insurance billing and data collection.

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The new diagnoses and codes will help provide needed documentation of the harms of transgender procedures and facilitate an avenue of recovery for these young people. The CDC update comes after medical watchdog group Do No Harm helped the CDC establish the codes.

Read more at the Federalist.

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Universities Should Prove They’re Playing Fair

Regarding your editorial “The New College Race Preferences” (Aug. 11): The Justice Department’s finding that Duke Law continues to discriminate—evidenced by higher scores among rejected applicants from some racial or ethnic groups than among accepted applicants from others—isn’t unique to one elite law school.

My organization, Do No Harm, submitted public-records requests to all 94 public medical schools seeking post-Students for Fair Admissions data on race, GPA, MCAT scores and admission decisions. Most schools either didn’t respond, stonewalled the request or demanded excessive fees to process the request. Among the 23 schools that responded by the time we published our findings, 13 showed that the average MCAT score of rejected Asian or white applicants exceeded the average MCAT score of accepted black applicants.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal.

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Trump administration accuses hospitals of improper billing over gender care for minors

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The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services accused dozens of hospitals and healthcare providers on Thursday of improperly billing for gender-affirming care ​and referred them to the Office of Inspector General and the Justice Department ‌for investigation.

[…]

HHS said that as gender care for ​minors has grown, it has become a larger revenue source for hospitals, creating financial incentives for more frequent billing. Citing conservative medical advocacy organization Do No Harm, the agency said hospitals and clinics billed ​nearly $120 million for the services provided to minors since 2019.

Read more at Reuters.