Is an STD a Gender Issue?

Today, one of my students informed me that she could not complete an assignment because of the error message you can see above.

My course explores the US health care system. We look at the concept of health, institutions like hospitals, the workforce, financing health care, and the outcomes of health care in the US. It’s a lot of describing things and explaining how they work, or don’t.

The assignment in question instructed students to go to the CDC website and investigate a resource called Atlas Plus. It’s an interactive system that allows them to look at the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases by jurisdiction, especially states. Their assignment was to explore the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), specifically Syphilis, Chlamydia, and Gonorrhea. They had chosen a state and hospital earlier and were to answer the following questions:

• What was the trend for each of these STDs in this state?
• What age, sex, and race/ethnicity groups were most affected by each STD?
• Which STD would you say is the biggest problem in this state? Why?
• How would this information be useful to health care professionals in the hospital you selected to study?

The idea was to acquaint them with the resource and explore STDs as a health care problem and wrestle with the policy implications of this issue. As budding health informaticians, they need to understand how institutions like hospitals can respond to not just outbreaks but everyday issues of disease incidence.

That is they could until yesterday, January 31. The Trump Administration took the site off line because they wanted to stamp out federal information on transgender care. As Newsweek put it, “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) started to remove language related to gender identity and sexual orientation in accordance with an executive order that President Donald Trump signed on Inauguration Day.”

What Trump has done is to limit the scope of topics that my students can study. He has also narrowed the information that is available to the public on a public health and health care issue of importance. To say that this is stupid is to understate how unwise it is.

One of the lessons we learned from classic authoritarians from Hitler to Putin is that information is a key to their power. If Trump’s minions can remove health information of importance from public access, who is to say that they won’t start altering or even fabricating it in the future.

That’s what Trump wanted to do during the pandemic. Well, he seems to be starting to do it now.