Speech First has uncovered records from more than 50 public medical schools across 46 states, revealing that these institutions are training left-wing advocates who prioritize race in treatment, promote gender identities contrary to biology, and downplay obesity’s health risks. As its report shows, under the guise of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), medical schools enforce conformity to leftist ideologies, such as labeling all white men as racists or disconnecting gender from biological sex. It also shows that free speech is on life support, with dissenters of these ideas and practices facing far-reaching consequences.
Speech First reviewed hundreds of documented reports, including the case of Dr. Norman Wang, who lost his teaching duties for criticizing affirmative action — which the left uses to admit less qualified minorities to meet racial quotas. Speech First’s report also detailed the case of Dr. Allan Josephson, who was fired for questioning pediatric transgender procedures — which the left champions as necessary for affirming so-called “gender identities.”
The hope was that exposing the medical establishment’s intolerance for dissent would incentivize medical schools to restore open discourse. But records unearthed by Speech First reveal they are doubling down, enforcing loyalty to DEI tenets — anti-racism, gender ideology, and, bizarrely, “weight inclusivity,” which claims body weight is not tied to one’s health.
Of the more than 50 schools Speech First investigated, 99 percent mandate anti-racism dogma, branding whites as inherently oppressive and casting physicians as crusaders for historical redress.
At the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, students must take an “Implicit Bias and Microaggressions” course, which uses a “Wheel of Power/Privilege” to frame white men as society’s ultimate oppressors, a narrative embedded across departments and continuing education credits, priming medical students to see patients through a racial lens, not medical need.
Eighty-nine percent enforce gender ideology, elevating self-proclaimed identities over biology and endorsing irreversible surgeries for children while stifling dissent.
At the University of Arizona College of Medicine, students are taught that so-called “gender transitioning” in children, starting with social changes like cross-dressing and progressing to puberty-suppressing drugs, is normal, and harassment policies stifle dissent by mandating preferred pronouns. Then there are cases of pure absurdity. At the University of Missouri School of Medicine, an orientation video, “What Doctors Should Know About Gender Identity,” suggests that “a biological male identifying as a woman” may need a gynecological exam.
Thirty percent promote weight inclusivity, framing obesity as oppression and urging students to use euphemisms like “person of larger size” instead of “overweight.”
UT-Austin Dell Medical School’s “Developing Outstanding Clinical Skills” program criticizes weight-loss strategies as fostering a “culture of shame.” Videos promote avoiding “weight stigma,” undermining patient health in favor of feelings. Instead of using the word “obese,” students are pushed to say, “person with larger size.”
These aren’t suggestions — they’re dictates, woven into admissions vows, mandatory training, clinical rotations, Hippocratic oaths, and more. But along with threats to free speech, medical schools’ definition of care is shifting in a dangerous direction.
I fear we are approaching an environment — if we’re not already there — where malpractice masquerades as virtuous health care. Picture a physician so bound by ideology he cannot explore the roots of gender dysphoria, instead pushing a child toward irreversible surgery to affirm gender; too fearful of being labeled “fatphobic” to warn an obese patient about heart failure; or so steeped in anti-racist dogma that a critically ill white male is deprioritized to favor a less urgent case for a black female patient.
These medical schools aren’t graduating healers — they’re graduating ideologues.
In Speech First’s report, Critical Condition: How Medical Schools Are Forcing DEI Orthodoxy on Future Physicians, I expose this crisis in great detail, with dozens of examples from medical schools across America. If the report proves anything, it’s that DEI is a metastasizing disease, eroding not just free speech, but medical ethics and just plain common sense.
Lawmakers, alumni of these schools, and the public must demand accountability, defund schools with ideological mandates, and restore medicine to its core mission: saving lives through reason and evidence.
Jared Gould is a research fellow at Speech First.
