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Dr. Rachel Levine followed by anti-trans politics at HHS job


This is the meat-and-potatoes of her job — enthusiastically and clearly explaining why public health measures are important. She speaks proudly of the efforts of her office on climate change, on the HIV epidemic and on “food is medicine” initiatives. Policies will surely change under Trump appointees, but she believes public health work will continue. “We have amazing civil servants here,” she says.

In her role, Levine has traveled the country, visiting local health departments and organizations. She speaks about a migrant farm worker she met in Orlando, Fla., and an arctic island she traveled to in Alaska. As she traveled, she likely was the first out transgender person many people she encountered had ever met.

‘I’m a resilient person and I’m fine’

She doesn’t usually share a lot about her transgender identity. She was born in 1957 and attended an all-male prep school outside of Boston, which was “obviously, a very interesting experience,” she says. “Remember, this is the early ’70s — I obviously had feelings about my gender, but what were you going to say and who would you tell?”

She came out as transgender decades later. “I think, for anyone, having a secret is not a healthy thing to do,” she says. “I think that transitioning and coming out and being my true authentic self has been liberating to me. It’s been an amazing experience.”

Levine has been a target in right-wing media, sometimes just for being trans, but also for supporting gender-affirming care.

She shrugs off the fact that her image was used in the anti-trans advertisements that dominated the final weeks of the presidential campaign. “It was very challenging, but I’m a resilient person and I’m fine.”

She told NPR in 2022 that “there is no argument among medical professionals […] about the value and importance of gender-affirming care.” Since then some high-profile medical professionals have called for caution in this medical field, including British pediatrician Hilary Cass. Those physicians are often cited by lawmakers seeking to ban this care. Cass was mentioned recently during Supreme Court arguments about whether such bans are constitutional.

“There is still widespread agreement about the medical utility of transgender medicine and transgender medicine for young people,” Levine maintains. “There is always ongoing research to study any of our medical protocols, and that would include transgender medicine. We should always have robust discussion and analysis of our treatment protocols, and they need to be based on data.”

She says those standards of care should then be applied carefully to individual patients. “That’s how we do pediatrics and that’s how it should be done,” she says.

That is separate from what’s happening with the proliferation of anti-trans state laws, she says. “This is really a politically and ideologically motivated effort developed by a think tank in Washington in order to attack the LGBTQI+ community, starting with the trans community,” she says. “And unfortunately, it has been very successful.”

She says she chooses to be optimistic that things will get better for trans people in the U.S.

Levine will resign on Inauguration Day. She says she’s going to move back to central Pennsylvania, take a vacation, and plan her next steps.

Medals outside of Admiral Levine's office
Medals outside of Admiral Levine’s office in the Humphrey building, where the Department of Health and Human Services is headquartered in Washington, D.C. (Maansi Srivastava for NPR)



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