US Justice Department calls for research on gender dysphoria and violent crime

The National Institute of Justice, part of the US Department of Justice, announced a funding opportunity on October 9, 2026 for research on gender dysphoria, its treatment and violent behavior, with a total budget of $1 million. The agency’s announcement says empirical evidence on the subject is limited, particularly concerning possible causal mechanisms.

The institute proposes analyzing existing data. Examples include violent crime prevalence, prisoner data, associations between violence and diagnosis or treatment, victim-offender overlap and co-occurring conditions. These are examples, rather than a requirement to study prisoners alone. Under the funding conditions, new primary data collection is outside the scope; applicants must explain their chosen data’s limitations and whether they can access it.

Initial applications must be submitted through Grants.gov by November 23, with full applications through JustGrants by November 30, US Eastern time.

Meghan Maury, policy director at the Transgender Law Center, expressed concern that the administration had predetermined its desired findings. As LGBTQ Nation reports, they made the remarks to Science. The Williams Institute’s Elena Redfield questioned access to diagnostic information in protected medical records. Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Alexander Tsai warned that analyzing a prisoner sample could inflate crime estimates.

According to the American Psychiatric Association, gender dysphoria is clinically significant distress associated with a mismatch between gender identity and sex assigned at birth. Not every transgender person has that diagnosis. Announcing the funding opportunity does not itself establish an association or a causal relationship between dysphoria, its treatment and violence.

Urania previously reported on the dispute over US Justice Department prison violence statistics and data on transgender prisoners.