The Biden administration is allocating nearly $700,000 for a new sex education program aimed at trans boys.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recently approved a $698,736 grant to California’s Center for Innovative Public Health Research, which currently works with the text message-based sexual health program Girl2Girl to advocate for pregnancy prevention and safe sex among queer, cisgender 14-to-18-year-old girls through condom and birth control usage and STI testing. This grant will go toward the center’s efforts to update the Girl2Girl program to make it more trans-inclusive.
“[Trans boys and non-binary youth assigned female at birth] are at risk for negative sexual health outcomes yet are effectively excluded from sexual health programs because gender-diverse youth do not experience the cisgender, heteronormative teen sexual education messaging available to them as salient or applicable,” the grant summary reads.
The summary continues: “Data suggest[s] that AFAB trans-identified youth may be less likely to use condoms when having sex with people who have penises and are at least as likely as cisgender girls to be pregnant. This health inequity must be addressed.”
The Center plans to use the grant to adapt Girl2Girl to create the program #TranscendentHealth, which will address systemic inequities AFAB trans youth experience, including “significant social stressors, discrimination, dysphoria, and rejection.” To do so, the center will hold focus groups to gather data about trans boys and non-binary teens’ sex lives, including information about their birth control strategies, condom use, PrEP use, and HIV testing rates. According to the grant page, the project began in September 2023 and will run until June 30, 2027.
Last September, the Biden administration’s National Institute of Health approved a $200,000 grant for an online mentorship program led by University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor Katie Edwards, which connects LGBTQ+ youth with LGBTQ+ adults to encourage “social-emotional skills acquisition.” Meanwhile, in August 2022, the HHS granted over $1 million to the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center to study thrombosis risk in trans youth receiving gender-affirming hormone therapy, according to the Shore News Network.
However, the Biden administration has also faced criticism for trans-related policies. After declining to comment on the onslaught of new anti-trans legislation at 2023’s State of the Union, the administration faced pushback from LGBTQ+ advocates last April for proposing a rule change to Title XI that would allow schools to block some trans athletes from participation in the name of “fairness in competition,” while prohibiting them from enacting sweeping bans on trans athletic participation.
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