Scientific Integrity and Pediatric Gender Healthcare: Disputing the HHS Review

Order 14187 ("Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation"; The President of the United States, 2025), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS, 2025) released a review of pediatric gender care for transgender and nonbinary (TGNB) children and adolescents that is replete with factual errors, distorts current scientific evidence, and defies expert medical consensus.The review joins a growing list of White House-endorsed actions that platform harmful practices against TGNB children and adolescents and their families, as well as the healthcare professionals who support them, with little regard for their civil rights and for the expertise that protects and promotes their well-being.As the Executive Order explicitly states, the HHS review was commissioned for the express purpose of "ending" gender-affirming care (GAC) for individuals under 19 years of age and "defunding" the medical research that supports it.The review reflects this politically motivated and biased agenda.The HHS review was not peer-reviewed, the authors were unnamed, and more than a fifth of its references are from popular media articles, blogs, or social media (Dowshen et al., 2025), compromising the transparency, accountability, and rigor central to scientific best practices.Leading healthcare associations, including