Two Massachusetts doctors are suing the Trump administration for removing their research from a patient safety website. In a lawsuit filed Wednesday, the doctors allege the deletions violated their rights to free speech.
The physicians, who are on the faculty at Harvard Medical School, received emails that said their studies were taken down because they used the terms “transgender” or “LGBTQ” to describe patients who should be screened because they have specific risks. The messages from the Trump administration said these terms violated an executive order that bans promoting "gender ideology."
The order launched the deletion of thousands of documents from the websites of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other federal health care agencies. Some have since been restored in response to public pressure or a court order, but not the papers from the two Harvard doctors
One of the removed papers is about risk factors for suicide. The other focuses on endometriosis, a painful condition that affects more than one in 10 American women.
The research disappeared in late January from the federal Patient Safety Network (PSNet), a public, peer-reviewed website where clinicians seek and share information about medical errors, problem diagnoses and best practices. It gets more than 3,000 visitors a day, according to the complaint.
Dr. Gordon Schiff, a primary care physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said he was told that his work, “Multiple Missed Opportunities for Suicide Risk Assessment in Emergency and Primary Care Settings,” was removed because of a single sentence: “High risk groups include male sex, being young, veterans, Indigenous tribes, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning (LGBTQ).”
Schiff said the website editors offered to repost the article if he removed the word “transgender.” He refused, calling the request an attack on scientific integrity.
“It would make the article inaccurate by removing one of the known risk factors for suicide,” said Schiff, who is the quality and safety director at Harvard’s Center for Primary Care. “This is all part of the process of increasing stigma for trans people and denying them their existence.”
According to the complaint, the paper on endometriosis was also taken down because of a single phrase in the lengthy article: “it is important to note that endometriosis can occur in trans and non-gender-conforming people.” Dr. Celeste Royce, a co-author and OB-GYN at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, said in a statement that she would not “censor” information about transgender patients.
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“Good doctors serve and advocate for their patients, whoever they are,” said Royce. “We cannot uphold an oath to 'Do No Harm' if our training and research are politicized.”
PSNet has removed more than two dozen papers since the Trump administration’s Office of Personnel Management issued a memo at the end of January telling federal agency and department heads to take down communications that “promote gender ideology.”
The doctors’ lawsuit is one of several challenging different aspects of Trump administration policies that call for removing references to gender in federal research, forms and publications, and limiting care for transgender patients. It was filed in federal court in Boston by the American Civil Liberties Union and other attorneys. The lawsuit asks that the articles be reinstated and that no further materials be removed because their point of view doesn’t align with President Trump’s.
“The whole purpose of this website is to promote patient safety and save lives,” said Jessie Rossman, legal director at the ACLU of Massachusetts. “One of the things that is so damaging about this censorship is that it is both unconstitutional and unsafe.”
Officials from PSNet declined to comment on the lawsuit. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which runs PSNet, and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees both, also did not comment.
Schiff said the White House directives are already having a “sweeping, chilling effect” on medical research.
“This whole process has completely changed what my colleagues are writing grants to study and the language we’re using,” Schiff said. “All this has taken a very wide toll."
This article was originally published on March 12, 2025.