Justice Department Bankrolls Research Linking Gender Dysphoria to Violent Crime

The Justice Department wants to know if there's a link between gender dysphoria and violent crime. Last month, its research arm — the National Institute of Justice — said it would hand out grants of up to $1m for studies into how often people diagnosed and treated for gender dysphoria commit violence, and what kind they commit. The notice landed as the Trump administration keeps squeezing transgender Americans' access to healthcare and to ID documents that carry their correct gender identity. It also arrives more than a year after the administration pulled funding from research into hate-fueled and extremist violence.

Critics aren't buying the science. LGBTQ+ advocates and researchers call the effort pseudoscience, pointing to a growing pile of academic work showing you can't pin violence on any single trait — not race, not politics, not gender. The common thread among high-profile attackers, they say, is ideology: racism, homophobia, misogyny, nihilism. Wendy Via, co-founder and CEO of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told the Guardian the administration keeps falsely painting trans people as extremists-in-waiting. That, she said, pulls attention away from far-right violence tied to ideas like the 'great replacement' theory — a favorite citation in shooters' manifestos. 'What the administration is doing is very dangerous,' Via said.

The speculation didn't start with this grant. After conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed in September 2025, right-wing influencers rushed to argue the suspected shooter was partly driven by what they call 'transgender ideology' — a phrase used to frame being trans as a political stance rather than an identity. That framing made it into a White House counter-terrorism report this year, which lists 'transgender ideologies' alongside leftwing violence as targets of its approach. The vast majority of US mass shootings are carried out by cisgender people, though transgender and non-binary people have committed some, including at Annunciation Catholic school in Minneapolis, Club Q in Colorado Springs and Tumbler Ridge elementary school in British Columbia.

'We don't know exactly why a person decides to commit mass violence, because they've all had things in their lives that have led them to it,' Via said. 'Being trans or being straight likely doesn't have anything to do with it.' Zane McNeill, a staff attorney with Lawyers for Good Government, sees the funding shift as a bait-and-switch — moving money away from the threat of far-right extremists. 'It's also about weaponizing funding decisions,' McNeill said, accusing the government of starving real projects while sending taxpayer dollars to what he calls far-right pseudoscience.