Between March 2021 and February 2024, HHS paid out $389,087 to a team of academics at Drexel to perform “quantitative” interviews with 30 transgender men across Delhi and Mumbai, India’s two largest cities. Additionally, the Biden administration provided the researchers with federal funding to distribute online surveys to 300 transgender men living in those cities. The ultimate goals of the publicly-funded research project were to “inform the development and evaluation of an intervention to promote mental health” for transgender people in India and to “impact rapidly evolving transgender health and social policies in India and beyond.”

Specifically, the study investigated the prevalence of mental health conditions, such as anxiety and suicidality, among transgender people in India. It sought to understand what variables were contributing to the occurrence of those conditions. The framework used by the team of Drexel researchers aimed to “put the gender back into transgender health,” according to the grant’s description.

The researchers argued that their work is necessary because the “transgender community is experiencing major socio-legal changes that may affect mental health” in India. One of the policy recommendations made in the final report produced by the team of researchers was to implement public funding for “gender-affirmative healthcare,” including hormone therapy and sex change surgeries.

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