(DCNF)—Gender researchers plan to steer thousands of dollars awarded by the Biden administration towards travel to transgender medical conferences, pronoun pins and payments to activists who work at LGBTQ clinics, according to documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The Biden administration awarded nearly $160,000 to University of Cincinnati researchers in June 2024 to launch a program to train students in health-related fields to work on “transgender and gender expansive” (TGGE) health, according to the description of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant.
“Transgender/gender expansive (TGGE) individuals are understudied, underrepresented, and underreported in health research, despite facing enormous gender inequities that affect morbidity and mortality,” the description explains. “The Healthcare Interprofessional Gender Health, Education and Research (HIGHER) Academy will augment the workforce of researchers focusing on the health of TGGE individuals by creating an adaptable, reproducible, sustainable research course for interprofessional graduate students that is taught exclusively by TGGE individuals and cisgender women.”
Set to begin in spring 2025, the program invites fifteen students enrolled in a master’s, doctoral, or postdoctoral programs to participate in one of three tracks to “promote TGGE health”: medical and surgical interventions, structural and social interventions or psychological and behavioral interventions, according to the website.
Budget justification documents obtained by the DCNF via a public records request detail how the researchers will spend the taxpayer funds.
Across four years, the program intends to spend $20,106 on instructor consultant services, $40,000 on honorariums for Community-Academic Advisory Board (CAAB) members, $31,500 on student stipends and $14,000 on food for its annual symposium, according to an annual breakdown.
Jonah Yokoyama, one of the leadership team members who documents show will be paid $38.66 per hour for work as a program consultant, is a “gender affirming care specialist” at Equitas Health University Medical Center.
Patients at Equitas Health, which bills itself as “one of the nation’s largest LGBTQ+ and HIV/AIDS-serving organizations,” are advised online that they do not need to consult with a psychiatrist or therapist to start taking cross-sex hormones.
“Your care team will listen to you and help you map out a hormone plan to reach your goals, including those that affirm non-binary or genderqueer identities,” the website states. “We know that no two paths to affirmation are the same.”
The grant’s principal investigator, Shanna Stryker, is also a physician offering “gender-affirming care” at Equitas Health.
Members of the HIGHER Academy Community Advisory Board (Credit: Screenshot/HIGHER Academy)
Community organizations or individuals “with lived experience” who join more than half of the program’s Community-Academic Advisory Board (CAAB) meetings will be awarded $500 every six months, per the budget document. There are 20 members of the CAAB in 2024-2025, according to the program website.
Eliot, who the website describes as a “fat, white, AuDHD, agender, queer, disabled spoonie, singleton, and failed misanthrope,” is one member of the board.
“A former digital marketing professional who was thrust into poverty when they became unemployable, they’ve been forced to master the unnecessarily complex & exhausting maze of government assistance simply to survive,” Eliot’s bio continues. “An amateur rabble-rouser, they enjoy using their limited spoons to sprinkle chaos into the cosmos by challenging the status quo and advocating for liberation for all. Because rest is resistance, they find solace in spending time with their feline roommate, Galen, and creating art and poetry.”
Students will each receive a $700 stipend for participating in HIGHER Academy. Organizers also plan to spend $600 on pronoun pins and $1,500 on custom lanyards for students.
The budget proposal includes funds for travel to World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) conferences. Over the next four years, $5,000 will be budgeted for a faculty member, scholar or student to attend the international WPATH conferences and $2,500 for domestic travel to the United States chapter conference.
Court documents unsealed last year revealed WPATH, which is often cited as an authority on transgender health, removed minimum age recommendations for sex-change surgeries from its guidance in response to political and legal concerns. The Biden administration, as well as the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), pressured WPATH to remove the age minimums.
WPATH also suppressed or failed to complete evidence reviews that contradicted its recommendations, courts records show.
The initial grant application highlights how the program will incorporate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), recruiting at least 30% of applicants from groups “underrepresented in healthcare.”
“Some examples of community partners we will engage include the Black Power Initiative, Cincinnati Black Pride, Heartland Trans Wellness, and the Cincinnati Trans Advocacy Council,” it states.
UC President Neville G. Pinto announced in February that the school would begin examining DEI programs and initiatives. However, the latest update explains “most DEI programs and practices are continuing at UC.”
“Soon after UC announced that DEI would be halted to comply with the February 14 ‘Dear Colleague’ letter, a U.S. District judge in Baltimore granted a preliminary injunction to certain aspects of President Trump’s executive order to end government support for DEI,” the university’s website explains.
The University of Cincinnati and HIGHER Academy’s program manager did not respond to requests for comment about the program’s status. The NIH also did not return a request for comment.
(Featured Image Media Credit: Screen Capture/CSPAN)
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.