The DEI Disconnect Between Actual Doctors and the Medical Elite

If there’s a beating heart to the “resistance,” it’s surely the medical establishment.

Prestigious organizations — from the American Medical Association to the American Academy of Pediatrics — routinely criticize the Trump administration for its many reforms. More broadly, these medical elites oppose virtually every effort to get divisive racial and gender ideology out of medicine and society at large. They give the impression that doctors are united in support of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” as well as transgender drugs and procedures for children. The medical establishment’s loud voice can be confusing for the majority of Americans.

But doctors themselves feel very different, as a new survey shows. They widely support these commonsense efforts to depoliticize medicine — and they prove that medical associations are the ones playing politics.

We created and dispensed surveys to a random sample of physicians across the Sunshine State. The Florida Department of Health publishes every physician’s contact information, making it easy to poll doctors from the Panhandle to the Keys. While Florida has become a reliably conservative state in recent years, physicians are generally more likely to be liberal or centrist.

The state has also been at the forefront of political efforts to roll back DEI and protect children from sex changes. With a highly visible activist community opposing both federal and state reforms, both sides of these issues are well known, making Florida an ideal state to gauge how physicians really think. Simultaneously, we conducted a randomized poll of 600 Florida voters to compare physicians to the population at large.

Remarkably, we didn’t just find that medical organizations are out of step with doctors. We also found that doctors are generally more anti-DEI and anti–gender ideology than the voting public. This makes sense. Doctors are uniquely positioned to recognize the danger of divisive and discriminatory DEI policies to patient care. They also see the suffering that children endure after receiving irreversible drugs and invasive surgeries in an attempted sex change. No wonder physicians are so opposed to ideology in medicine.

To start, we found that 68 percent of doctors (including 63 percent of non-white physicians) support merit-based university admissions, compared to 59 percent of voters. That matters because national medical organizations support discriminatory policies under the guise of affirmative action. Yet doctors themselves can attest that elevating skin color over merit is a danger to patients. It necessarily leads to a lower quality of physician, ultimately providing a lower quality of care. That’s the last thing doctors want.

Doctors also overwhelmingly reject the foundational DEI claim that patients do better when they see patients who share their race. Groups like the AMA have pushed this lie for decades, despite reams of evidence to the contrary and despite the fact that it’s tantamount to endorsing racial segregation. But doctors know better, with 69 percent overall saying there’s no benefit to doctor-patient race matching and 63 percent of non-white doctors agreeing with the majority. The public also knows better, with nearly 80 percent of Floridians rejecting DEI’s subtle endorsement of medical segregation.

On the gender front, doctors overwhelmingly oppose subjecting children to transgender drugs and procedures, with two-thirds supporting bans on such treatments. Their opposition is even stronger than that of the public, who are 60 percent supportive of protecting children. Nearly 90 percent of doctors say that social media — not biological reality — is pushing children down the sex-change path. Yet national medical associations uniformly say that doctors should support children who want to transition, regardless of the harm to their developing bodies and minds. Clearly, those groups don’t actually speak for most doctors.

This disconnect between medical associations and actual medical professionals is deeply concerning. The organizations have massive public sway — influencing media coverage, policy debates, and even court decisions. But as this new survey shows, the medical establishment doesn’t speak for the doctors who are providing actual care for patients. To the contrary: These groups speak for a narrow group of ideologues, pushing radical politics instead of advocating on behalf of physicians and patients. The best thing Americans can do is ignore the medical elite — and stand with their doctors to drive ideology out of medicine for good.

Karen Cyphers is a teaching faculty member at Florida State University and vice president of research at Sachs Media. Ian Kingsbury is the director of the Center for Accountability in Medicine at Do No Harm.