Doctors from Harvard Medical School on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration contesting the disappearance of certain articles from a government-run website meant for medical researchers.
The group claims the federal government deleted papers including words like “LGBTQ” and “trans” from the Patient Safety Network, a website meant to help doctors share research about medical errors, patient outcomes and misdiagnoses.
The lawsuit claims the Trump administration’s action violated the First Amendment among other things.
Celeste Royce, an assistant professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive biology at Harvard Medical School, told GBH News that she was shocked when she learned from a colleague that a paper she co-authored had been removed from the website. She said the paper, written five years ago, focused on endometriosis and included a sentence about diagnosis in trans and gender nonconforming people.
“I couldn’t even remember anything about the article that could have been controversial other than that it was focusing on women’s health. And, you know, I think that 'women’ is one of the words that’s being censored in that list,” she said. “Good doctors serve and advocate for their patients, whoever they are.”
Another paper, plaintiffs claim, was about suicide risk that included a single sentence about heightened risk in LGBTQ communities.
The doctors are represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, the national ACLU and the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale Law School. The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts on Wednesday.
The Patient Safety Network is a subsidiary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Nobody from the department could be reached for comment.
When GBH News typed ”LGBTQ“ into a search box on the government-run website, the response was: ”Your applied search for 'LGBTQ’ didn’t return any results.”
In January, President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order requiring federal agencies to remove all statements that “promote or otherwise inculcate gender ideology.”
The removal of the research papers is part of a broader policy of censorship focused on diversity, equity and inclusion that has impacted almost every aspect of government.
Last week, Trump spoke about restoring “free speech” to the United States during his address to Congress . “I’ve stopped all government censorship and brought back free speech in America,” he said.
But the ACLU says the president’s embrace of free speech could not be more “Orwellian,” from their perspective, given the pace of censorship across government agencies.
Royce and fellow doctors at Harvard Medical School say it is imperative to challenge the government’s actions, which could have a chilling effect on medical and scientific research.
Rachel Davidson, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Massachusetts who specializes on free expression issues, said the plaintiffs are seeking immediate injunctive relief from the court.
“We’re asking the court to declare that these actions violated the First Amendment and the Administrative Procedure Act. And we’re asking the court also to order going forward that the government can’t take these actions again with respect to other papers simply because they contain, you know, one of these forbidden words like transgender,” she said. ”We want that immediate relief to get these important papers back online.”
The ACLU says the president’s executive orders — seeking to outlaw diversity, equity and inclusion measures — is akin to the suppression of First Amendment protections experienced during the McCarthy era of the 1950s.
“I think the administration fundamentally has a disdain for the First Amendment,” said Scarlet Kim, senior staff attorney for the speech, privacy and technology project at the ACLU. “I think that they want to basically suppress viewpoints, that they find disfavorable, that they disdain, that they are going to do so until a court tells them that they cannot.”
