This article is part of “Finding Pride in a Divided America,” a special series from MSNBC Daily.
In early June, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced his decision to purge 17 members from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a panel of public health and medical experts who advise the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on vaccines. In the following weeks he replaced them with anti-vaccine activists and leading suppliers of misinformation. We saw the consequences many feared from this action on Thursday when new HHS hire Lyn Redwood, a nurse practitioner and president of an anti-vaccine group founded by Kennedy, presented data to ACIP on flu vaccines based on a widely debunked theory.
Kennedy’s reconfiguring of ACIP comes as part of his larger promise to, in his words, extend so-called “medical freedom” and “health choice” to all Americans.
Coming during Pride Month, the act of imposing his views under the guise of freedom and autonomy hits especially hard.
This touting of freedom, choice and independence has a particularly hypocritical ring this time of year.
This June marks the 56th commemoration of the Stonewall Riots, a week of uprisings in the early summer of 1969 when queer and trans patrons of the Greenwich Village bar revolted in response to police raids. While this year the month has been marked by the usual marches and celebrations, it’s also marked by a period when LGBTQ civil rights and cultural acceptance are facing an accelerated retraction, with an intense focus on rescinding health care access.
Kennedy and his Make America Healthy Again movement claim that his policy moves will give Americans the power to make personal health choices free from government overreach. But this MAHA agenda so far focuses on “informed choices” like whether to get routine vaccines, seeking “radical transparency” by dismantling agencies responsible for the oversight of food safety, and focusing on individual responsibility for one’s health — rather than tackling systemic issues like poverty, racism and sexism that lead to worse health outcomes.
This touting of freedom, choice and independence has a particularly hypocritical ring this time of year. Not only are they a veneer for policies that will leave Americans with fewer safety protections and diminished access to health care, but they propel support for the Trump administration’s ferocious efforts to deprive queer and trans Americans of the very same decision-making power over our own bodies and lives.
The movement has placed groups like “crunchy” teenagers, momfluencers, and Gen Z and millennial women who’ve historically leaned toward the Democratic Party in a coalition with MAGA’s most far-right proponents. Using rhetoric about bodily autonomy co-opted from the reproductive justice movement, Kennedy’s movement and its (largely white) influencers have exploited real fears about fertility, food additives and pollution to generate support for another Trump election that paved the way for his administration to advance an anti-LGBTQ and anti-DEI agenda. And has it ever.
Since entering office, President Donald Trump has issued a flurry of executive orders targeting LGBTQ rights and DEI programs that impact the health and acceptance of LGBTQ people, including directing Kennedy in his capacity as HHS secretary to end access to gender-affirming care for trans youth and separately pausing funding for the PEPFAR program, which provides HIV medication and support abroad.
Under Kennedy’s leadership, HHS has placed LGBTQ people at the center of the bull’s-eye by stripping away access to health care and resources. The agency was reported in March to be weighing preliminary plans that would gut the CDC’s Division of HIV Prevention, which promotes testing, tracks HIV infections and conducts research.
In early May, HHS released a report by unnamed authors condemning gender-affirming care that the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics said “misrepresents the current medical consensus and fails to reflect the realities of pediatric care.” “The MAHA Report” focusing on children’s health, released in May and laden with errors, echoes the earlier document, referring to gender-affirming care for youth as an unresearched “harm.” Meanwhile, the report makes no mention of intersex children, who are often forced to undergo medically unnecessary surgeries for atypical genitalia.
Beyond the federal government, two dozen states have passed bills targeting trans people in 2025 alone, according to the Trans Legislation Tracker, and lawmakers in nine states have introduced measures to weaken same-sex marriage, which has conferred the right for same-sex spouses to access each other’s health insurance and make medical decisions for their families. All this as the Supreme Court ruled to uphold a state-level ban on access to gender-affirming care for youth and has taken up a case challenging a ban on conversion therapy. While Kennedy sets HHS’ sights on destroying access to gender-affirming care and HIV/AIDS support and research, the MAHA movement has taken up its own mantle on forms of gender-affirming care and disease prevention. These efforts amount to an attack on the physical and mental well-being of LGBTQ Americans and seek to eradicate transgender people from existing altogether — an effort that Kennedy was complicit in long before entering government. On his own podcast and in other interviews, Kennedy has falsely claimed that pollutants cause gender dysphoria, comparing trans youth to lab frogs that can be “chemically castrated” by being exposed to hormones in one discussion with the alt-right podcaster Jordan Peterson, which was removed from YouTube in 2023 for what the platform said violated its vaccine misinformation policy. In step with this disinformation, Kennedy has claimed that AIDS is caused by poppers and a “gay lifestyle,” rather than HIV. While Kennedy sets HHS’ sights on destroying access to gender-affirming care and HIV/AIDS support and research, the MAHA movement has taken up its own mantle on forms of gender-affirming care and disease prevention. Women leaders in the movement decry a “reproductive crisis,” not by calling out diminished access to abortion care or IVF, but by focusing their criticism on hormonal birth control and mammograms. Others peddle supplements like methylene blue, which is used to treat a blood disorder but is otherwise a textile dye that followers claim provides protection from Alzheimer’s and other illnesses (there is no evidence for this, but it does turn their tongues blue). The basis for these concerns may come from legitimate questions about birth control and a sincere desire to protect oneself against devastating illnesses. Yet there is a deeply sinister irony to MAHA’s fear that grave medical injustices are being committed against them and their families. The movement seldom, if ever, acknowledges America’s history of medical experimentation performed on Black people, forced sterilization of disabled people, and “treatments” like lobotomies and exorcisms given to “cure” LGBTQ people in the past — all part of a craven legacy that the Trump administration seeks to censor by cutting DEI programs and criminalizing the teaching of racism, slavery and inequality. But for the very groups its leaders now target, MAHA’s greatest fears have already come true. Half a year into the Trump administration, it’s clear that Kennedy and his MAHA movement are fortifying a pipeline from wellness culture to the anti-LGBTQ far right through policy, reports and the gutting of panels vital to supporting Americans’ health, while plying supporters with debunked wellness talk and empty promises of independence. It’s the same tired homophobia and transphobia rebranded as health freedom, and LGBTQ people — especially trans youth — are being stripped of our choices until we’ll have none at all.
Alex Berg
Alex Berg is a journalist and creative director based in New York City. 
