A University of Maryland doctoral student named Pond Ezra — who goes by "Mx." and uses they/them pronouns — is currently receiving federal grant money from the National Institutes of Health to study "seahorse dads." The project title, and I promise I am reading this verbatim, is "Longitudinal Mixed Methods Analysis of Risk and Protective Factors Influencing Psychological Distress in Sexual and Gender Minority Birthing People."
This is happening right now. Under President Trump's NIH. In 2026.
The study, which carries NIH Project ID 11165807, launched in February 2026 and is funded through at least 2029. Its stated goal is to "elucidate how social support and medical care contribute to the mental health trajectories of SGM birthing people throughout the perinatal period." Translation for those of us who still speak English: they want to study the feelings of biological women who identify as men while pregnant. And they'd like you to pay for it.
Ronna Popkin is listed as the NIH project program official overseeing the grant. Which means someone inside the federal bureaucracy looked at this proposal, read the phrase "gender minority birthing people," and thought, yes, this is exactly what American taxpayers should be funding.
Beth Parlato, Senior Legal Counsel at the Independent Women's Forum, didn't mince words. "NIH should fund research that improves maternal health, but taxpayer dollars should not be used to embed gender ideology into scientific research," Parlato told The College Fix. She added that "pregnancy is a biological reality unique to women" and warned that "when researchers erase sex from research about pregnancy and childbirth, they risk obscuring the very biological distinctions that sound medical research depends upon."
She's right, obviously. But the deeper issue isn't one grant or one doctoral student with creative pronouns. It's the machinery.
Trump signed executive orders explicitly targeting gender ideology in federal agencies. The policy from the top is clear. And yet, somewhere in the bowels of NIH, a grant review board approved a multi-year study built entirely on the premise that biological sex is negotiable. The bureaucracy didn't resist the executive orders with a press conference or a protest. It just kept writing checks.
This is how the permanent government operates. You can change the president. You can change the cabinet secretary. You can sign orders and hold press conferences. And the GS-14 in the grants office will keep funding whatever the academic establishment tells them to fund, because the approval process is designed to be frictionless for insiders and impenetrable for oversight.
Some will argue this is protected by a federal court order blocking enforcement of Trump's gender-related executive orders on certain research. Which is a convenient legal shield for a study that treats the word "woman" like a slur. The court didn't order NIH to fund this specific project. It said the administration couldn't categorically defund research. There's a wide gap between "you can't shut down all LGBT-related health studies" and "you must hand grant money to someone studying seahorse dads."
The phrase itself — "gender minority birthing people" — tells you everything about where the academic-bureaucratic complex has landed. "Birthing people" was supposed to be the fringe. It was the thing people on Twitter said that normal Democrats waved off as an exaggeration. Now it's in the title of a federally funded research project, with a program official, a multi-year timeline, and your money behind it.
Pregnancy is not a gender experience. It's a biological event that happens to women. Every dollar spent pretending otherwise is a dollar not spent on actual maternal health research — the kind that might help the women who are, statistically and biologically, the only people giving birth.
