On the treacherous attacks against gender medicine

On behalf of the Editorial board of the Journal

The international scientific community is beginning to take a stance against the devastating, indiscriminate cuts to research under the new Trump administration. Many scientific journals have voiced their opposition, highlighting the risks posed by policies that are generally anti-science, and particularly harmful to medical sciences. For instance, The Lancet states: “Health must be a social good, a benefit for society, a driver of economies, and a path to development”, and announced its commitment to monitor the actions of the US administration and their impact on the health of world population, including the American population, urging the scientific community to unite and respond.1 The BMJ pointed out that “America first” cannot mean “America alone”.2 Two further leading scientific-biomedical journals, Science and Nature, have also opposed the cultural barbarism and executive orders that have cancelled or frozen tens of billions of dollars in research funding and caused thousands of job losses.3,4 The European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities (ALLEA) has also emphasized the dangers of threats to academic freedom and international collaboration in research. Dozens of European institutions have joined its statement (https://allea.org/portfolio-item/allea-statement-on-threats-to-academic-freedom-and-international-research-collaboration-in-the-united-states/?).

However, as we strive through this scientific journal to develop biomedical knowledge in the field of sex- and gender-specific medicine, i.e. for a medicine that takes care of every person, the most concerning issue for us is the inhibition superimposed to the studies that mention terms related to sex and gender. Unfortunately, ignorance has given rise to monstrous theories: the so-called “gender theory” that some politicians are afraid of, and which no one in the scientific community knows anything about, except as a political invention with discriminatory purposes. This could undermine the research and development of gender medicine – the very field we have been working on for years –, trying to understand whether and how diagnosis and therapies should differ between men and women. We hope that the enlightened America that still exists, resists, and believes in scientific progress will manage to counter the Trumpian obscurantism. In the meantime, we will continue on our cultural path, confident that sex and gender are crucial variables in biology and medicine5, for the advancement of humanity that values differences as a precious variable for improving the lives of all human beings.

References

1. The Lancet. American chaos: standing up for health and medicine. Lancet. 2025 Feb 8;405(10477):439.

2. Abbasi K. Trump and the tech bros: demagogues of harm to human and planetary health. BMJ. 2025;388:r196.

3. Thorp HH. Come together, right now. Science. 2025 Feb 24:eadw9972.

4. Nature. Trump 2.0: an assault on science anywhere is an assault on science everywhere. Nature. 2025 Mar;639(8053):7-8.

5. Becker JB, Ahmed SB. Sex differences research is important! Biol Sex Differ. 2025 Mar 10;16(1):20.