CDC Removes Gender Identity, Sexual Orientation and HIV Web Pages Following Trump's DEI Purge

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) scrubbed references to gender equity, sexual orientation and HIV-related content on its website to comply with President Donald Trump's directives against DEI.

As of Saturday afternoon, pages on the agency's site about HIV treatments for transgender people and information about LGBTQ+ youth health were missing or down.

Charles Ezell, the acting director of the U.S. office of personnel management, informed CDC employees in a Jan. 29 email titled "Defending Women" that they cannot refer to or promote "gender ideology," NBC News reported.

The term is used by conservative groups to describe what they call "woke" views on sex and gender, emphasizing that there are only two sexes: male and female.

CDC employees scrambled to abide with the order by Friday's deadline, but staffers had to resort to taking down a number of HIV-related web pages whether or not they referred to gender.

"The process is underway," an agency staffer told NBC News, asking not to be identified to avoid retaliation.

"There's just so much gender content in HIV that we have to take everything down in order to meet the deadline," the staffer said.

Trump signed an executive order last week, one of dozens that affects how the government operates, that asserts that the U.S. government will only recognize two sexes: male and female.

The order also calls on agencies to stop spending on what it calls "radical and wasteful" DEI programs and use the term "sex" rather than "gender."

The employee questioned how a government agency can function if it is unable to communicate using certain words or terminology.

"How can we work on preventing HIV among the populations who are most at risk for it if we can't talk about it?" the worker told NBC News. "This essentially shuts our entire agency down. We are scrambling to figure out what to do."