Somewhere inside the National Institutes of Health, a study titled "Longitudinal Mixed Methods Analysis of Risk and Protective Factors Influencing Psychological Distress in Sexual and Gender Minority Birthing People" — Project Number 11165807 — is alive and funded. It launched in February 2026, it's scheduled to run through at least 2029, and yes, your tax dollars are paying for it.
That's six weeks after Trump took office.
The study is being conducted by Pond Ezra, a University of Maryland doctoral student who uses "Mx." as an honorific and "they" as a pronoun. The NIH project program official overseeing it is Ronna Popkin. The College Fix reported on the grant this week, and the details read like a parody of everything the Trump administration said it was going to eliminate.
Remember the executive order? "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government." Big title. Clear language. The kind of thing that gets a standing ovation at a rally and a framed printout in the West Wing. Trump signed it. We cheered.
A federal court blocked parts of it. And the NIH kept writing checks.
Beth Parlato, Senior Legal Counsel at the Independent Women's Forum, put it plainly: "NIH should fund research that improves maternal health, but taxpayer dollars should not be used to embed gender ideology into scientific research."
She went further. "Pregnancy is a biological reality unique to women," Parlato said. "When researchers erase sex from research about pregnancy and childbirth, they risk obscuring the very biological distinctions that sound medical research depends upon, ultimately making it more difficult to identify and address health outcomes unique to women."
That's the part that should bother everyone, not just culturally but medically. We're not talking about some academic debate over pronouns in a faculty lounge. This is the federal health research apparatus deciding that biological sex is optional in a study about pregnancy. About giving birth. The one biological function that has never, in the history of the species, been performed by a male.
The executive branch can sign orders all day. It can hold press conferences and post the documents on the White House website. None of that matters if the mid-level program officers at NIH keep approving grants that run directly counter to the policy.
This is how the swamp actually works. Not with dramatic resistance or CNN press conferences. With paperwork. With grant approvals that slide through while everyone's watching the big fights over budgets and confirmations. A doctoral student at the University of Maryland gets federal funding to study "psychological distress in sexual and gender minority birthing people," and nobody in the chain of command catches it — or worse, they catch it and wave it through.
