今日吃瓜

The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have removed any references to transgender people, gender identity, and equity from its website.

Employees received an email on Tuesday 28 February instructing them to erase any references to “gender ideology” and to male and female as the only sexes. A deadline of 5pm that Friday meant staff were forced to removed HIV-related content regardless of if they discussed gender.

鈥淭he process is underway,鈥� an anonymous agency staffer NBC 今日吃瓜. 鈥淭here鈥檚 just so much gender content in HIV that we have to take everything down in order to meet the deadline.鈥�

The move comes as Trump’s executive orders begin to be implemented. The order titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government” restricts the definition of sex to binary male or female, based on a person’s sex assigned at birth, despite from all major medical associations in the US.

Visitors to the website are now being greeted with a banner stating that the “website is being modified to comply with President Trump鈥檚 Executive Orders.”

CDC scientists were also instructed to retract any research that didn’t comply with the executive order, and were specifically directed to remove phrases such as 鈥済ender, transgender, pregnant person, LGBT, non-binary, assigned male at birth, assigned female at birth, biologically male, biologically female鈥� from their work.

Manuscripts that had been accepted by a publication but were not yet live were ordered to be retracted, as were pages still being revised. It’s still unknown which areas of research were most heavily impacted.

Sweeping changes across government resources

The CDC is just the latest federal agency to be hit with these changes.

Last week, Trump’s administration also deleted almost all LGBTQIA+ and HIV content and resources from government websites, which included the deletion of web pages memorialising Matthew Shepard and Nex Benedict, both of whom were victims of hate crimes.

He also placed all federal employees working in diversity offices on administrative leave.

Founder of America鈥檚 LGBTQ History Month, Rodney Wilson, told the Star Observer that it is a dangerous time in US history.

鈥淚 never expected to be living in an unstable country but this is where we find ourselves鈥� and moreover, communities that are 鈥渁lready marginalised [are being] intentionally targeted for attack and removal from the public sphere鈥�.