Taxpayers spent $43,576 for a self-described Donald Trump “resistance” supporter to study the “health status of gender minorities,” the Washington Free Beacon revealed Tuesday.
National Institute of Health (NIH) paid Ethan Cicero, a post-doctoral student at Duke University, to conduct the study. Cicero has views on gender that call his research into question — for example, he believes having a “vagina does not equal woman.”
Cicero said he was employed by “the Resistance” on his now-private Facebook page, and has a cover photo that displays “Resist 45” — a reference to Trump. Cicero put the words “Not My President” on his profile picture on Inauguration Day, and reportedly set his Facebook account to “private” after the Free Beacon requested comment.
The PhD. student also wrote on Facebook that Vice President Mike Pence’s pro-life views only apply to “white, straight, and American individuals/babies.”
Cicero’s previous research suggest hospitals ask individuals for their preferred pronouns and to “be sensitive to shared spaces” by keeping the “gender to which they identify in mind” when placing transgender individuals in rooms.
Cicero also attacked doctors for “incorrectly us[ing] sex and gender interchangeably,” since gender is “more abstract and refers to the complex relationships among gender biology (sex), gender identity (one’s sense of being female, male, both, or neither), and gender expression (outward presentation behaviors, and roles).”
“The transgender (TG) community experience health disparities associated with individual factors, such as gender identity and expression,” reads to the grant. “To date, the majority of TG health-related studies have taken a narrow view of health by focusing on mental health outcomes and cross-sex hormone therapy, and frequently conceptualized health as the absence of engagement in health-harming behaviors.”
NIH awarded the grant to Cicero on May 1 and will fund the research until August 2018.
Send tips to andrew@
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.