As part of the study, a national sample of over 1,200 U.S. adults answered a questionnaire assessing their beliefs about the importance of affirming people’s “gender identity,” purported threats to individuals who identify as transgender, their support for anti-democratic behavior such as blocking an elected official from taking office, and whether they believe there is a “trans genocide” in the United States.

The belief that an entire group of people are actively being wiped out on a genocidal scale that, therefore, necessitates some form of violent resistance mirrors broader past research showing that “collective victimhood” of a perceived existential threat can increase an individual’s support for hard-line or punitive actions.

Indeed, the HHS-funded study’s results indicate that gender ideology is strongly associated with authoritarian attitudes alongside a willingness to justify political violence. Of the participants surveyed, those who held left-wing authoritarian views were more likely to see political violence as morally justifiable than their non-liberal counterparts.

Both adoption of gender ideology and left-wing authoritarianism were associated with greater endorsement of political violence across all six scenarios presented to the survey respondents: the real-life killings of Charlie Kirk and UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, the hypothetical assassination of President Donald Trump, arson attacks on Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities, destruction of wealthy people’s property, and anti-police violence. Participants had rated their support for each violent event on a five-point scale ranging from “Not at all justified” to “Completely justified.”

The survey also measured participants’ approval of compelled “gender affirmation,” including through the legally mandated use of preferred pronouns and institutional enforcement actions, such as the removal of a YouTube video for “deadnaming,” or using a transgender-identifying person’s original name.

Participants’ threat perception was factored in as well, determining how “dangerous” respondents believed various groups, including Republicans, police, Christians, white people, and the Supreme Court, to be toward transgender-identifying individuals.

The researchers discovered that participants who strongly endorsed “gender-affirming” positions scored dramatically higher on left-wing authoritarianism, even after accounting for political identity and age. That suggests the link between gender ideology and authoritarianism is not simply explained by an individual’s left-wing affiliations alone. Among the central questions posed, the researchers contemplated if left-wing authoritarianism is “just a proxy for being liberal.” Those associations persisted in data models that controlled for Left/Right political identification.

To measure the participants’ assimilation of gender ideological positions, the researchers developed the Clinical Gender Affirmation Scale, which drew items from guidance issued by major pro-transgender medical bodies, including the American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association, World Professional Association for Transgender Health, and American Academy of Pediatrics.

Respondents accordingly rated on a sliding scale whether they agreed or disagreed with the positions derived directly from the leading transgender-friendly institutions’ clinical language. “Failure to affirm a transgender person’s gender identity increases the risk of serious psychological distress to the trans person” and “Parents should support their children’s transgender exploration” were two of the beliefs, plucked from the organizations’ medical guidance on treating gender dysphoria and presented as a litmus test to the participants.

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The study’s researchers posited that the medical guidance is ideologically structured around “minority stress theory,” the belief system that societal prejudice creates chronic identity-based psychological stress for marginalized groups that physically affects their well-being, and extends that framework to transgender-identifying individuals.

Consequently, the researchers surmised, gender ideologues consuming this advisory material as established standards of care believe “failure to affirm becomes a source of physical harm” and that “skepticism toward affirmation becomes a clinical risk factor.”

“In this sense, the framework does not merely regulate belief; it can arm authoritarian psychology by activating threat, resentment, punitive certainty, and defensive group identification,” the HHS report says.

Thus, the researchers proposed that gender ideology provides “ideological fuel” for an authoritarian mind. For instance, gender ideology specifies perceived sources of harm, such as right-wing figures in favor of restrictive transgender policies. “Within the proposed model, this perceived threat structure may provide authoritarian psychology with an identifiable set of enemies or oppressors — groups toward whom coercion, punishment, censorship, or institutional control can be morally rationalized as protective action,” the researchers wrote.

The report’s authors, however, noted that their findings are correlational and cannot determine causation. They plan on conducting a second, experimental study to test causality, whether exposure to gender ideology directly produces a left-wing authoritarian mindset.

Prior to the release of the Trump HHS-sponsored study, research examining authoritarianism in the U.S. has historically focused overwhelmingly on the political Right, while left-wing motives have been widely overlooked in American academia.

Violence connected to gender ideology remains largely unstudied, with little to no documentation in academic literature. Wednesday’s study results offer one of the first systematic looks at the psychological underpinnings that shape such ideologically motivated violence.

“[F]ederal agencies and public safety officials are concerned not only with ideology in the abstract, but with radicalization pathways: the content that tells people who to fear, why the situation is urgent, and when force becomes acceptable,” the study’s researchers wrote. “This study suggests that the same psychological machinery operates on the extreme left, and that it may be running through institutional channels — clinical guidelines, professional standards, credentialed expertise — that current threat-detection frameworks are not well designed to recognize.”

Correlational research in recent years suggests that social justice framing sometimes converges with authoritarian psychology when centered on perceived grievances, an oppressor-oppressed mentality, or punitive justice-seeking.

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According to the HHS-hired researchers, this overlap reveals a common theme that declares an oppressor class, certifies victimization, and endorses recourse in a coercive institutional response.

“Together, these findings support the paper’s core claim,” the researchers wrote, namely that gender ideology may function as “an ideological accelerant, telling left-wing authoritarian psychology who the enemy is, why the situation is urgent, and — in those already disposed toward force — that violence is legitimate.”