Nov 22, 2025
3 min read
Policies and cancer registries in 2026, women, women, or unknown or unknown agents will harm the health of people of many ethnicities.
US cancer statistics officials will soon have to classify patients' gender as male, female or unknown, a change scientists and advocates say will harm the health of transgender people, one of the nation's most marginalized populations.
Scientists and trans rights advocates say the change will make it much harder to understand cancer diagnoses and trends among the trans population.Some studies have shown that transgender people are more likely to use tobacco products or undergo less routine cancer screenings, factors that may put them at greater risk of the disease.
The change is a result of the Trump administration's policy of recognizing only "male" and "female," according to oncologists.
Scientists say the change will affect all registries, in every state and territory, because they receive federal funding.Starting in 2026, the Registry, which is funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, will not recognize cancer as male, female or unknown.
Current registries indicate whether a cancer patient's gender is "Male," "Other," "Other," "Multiple Choices," or the patient's gender is not specified or unknown.
In January, President Donald Trump issued an executive order that the government would recognize only men and women.Registration officials say the federal government has ordered them to change the way they collect data on cancer patients.
"In the U.S., if you're federal money, we don't really have a choice," said the director of the North American Association of Participating Registries.
Authorities will have to classify patients' sex as unknown when “the patient's sex is listed as male or female (e.g., non-binary, transgender) and no additional information about sex was provided at birth,” the new policy says.
Miss the big picture
The researchers said they don't have high-quality population-based data on the incidence of cancer in transgender people, but they are making progress in improving it — work that is now in danger of being undone.
"When it comes to cancer and inequality around cancer, you can use the cancer registry to see where the air pollution is the most because the incidence of lung cancer is high in those areas. You can see the effects of nuclear waste storage because of the type of cancer that is high in those areas of the country," Shannon Kozlovich said.
"There are a lot of components to this population, which means there's something we know about this data," he said."That doesn't mean it's not."
For decades, the cancer registry has been the most comprehensive registry in the US for understanding cancer and understanding survival rates and identifying psychological trends. It is a comprehensive surveillance tool.Annual cancer cases are reported by hospitals, pathology laboratories and other health facilities to regional cancer registries.The data collected document cancer and mortality rates in different regions, races, sexes, and age groups.
Both federal programs serve as the supreme authorities on cancer statistics, with information on tens of millions of cases.CDC's National Cancer Registry Program provides funding to organizations in 46 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, and the US Pacific Islands territories.Its data represents 97% of the US population.The National Cancer Institute's Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results Program, known as SEER, collects and publishes data from registries covering nearly half the US population.
Data published by cancer registries have led to changes in treatment and prevention and the implementation of other policies aimed at reducing morbidity and mortality.
For example, data collected from cancer registries is key to identifying the rising rates of colon cancer in large numbers of people under the age of 50. As a result, U.S. guidelines recommend screening adults at age 45, not age 45.
The countries have their own measures. sick Anton himself, a spokesperson in the Department of State Health, the highest cancer cancer in 2018 found the largest country in 2018 found the most common country in 2018 found the most common country in 2018 Level.Texas cancer registration joining 2021.
"When a cancer patient is entered into a cancer registry, we follow the patient for their recovery," Durbin said."That's very important for public ethics."
The North American Association of Central Cancer Registries maintains national standards that define which registries collect data for each diagnosis.It developed the list in collaboration with the CDC, the National Cancer Institute, and other organizations.
For any given patient, registries collect more than 700 pieces of information, including demographics, diagnosis, treatment and length of survival, Durbin said, under NAACCR standards.
The NAACCR definitions and accompanying data standards are designed to ensure that registries collect case data uniformly.
In an emailed statement, Department of Health and Human Services spokesman Andrew Nixon said, "HHS is using biological science to guide policy, not the ideological agendas that the Biden administration has pushed for."
NAACCR publishes regularly updated guidelines.But changing the "gender" category to remove transgender options in 2026 was an urgent measure because of Trump administration policies, Kozlewicz said.He was part of a group that called for a change in cancer data collection so that gender and gender identity are included as separate data points.
According to an analysis of CDC data by the Williams Keeper at the UCLA School of Law, 2.8 million youth age 13 and younger have identified as transgender.
Scientists and Prons of copyright mentioned in the discussion that there are symptoms that can cause people to injure or heal more than others.
"If there's no evidence for our health, you're going to take something to fix it," says you, executive director of the LGBTQIA Network.
In the yearA study published in 2022 found that smokers were two to three times more likely to be active using cigarettes, e-cigarettes, or cigarettes than those who used pacifiers, e-cigarettes, or cigarettes.Tobacco use is a cause of cancer and cancer death.
A 2019 Canadian study found that transgender people were less likely to receive recommended screening for breast, cervical and colorectal cancer.A 2023 study by Stanford Medical researchers found that LGBTQ+ patients were nearly three times more likely to experience breast cancer recurrence than cisgender heterosexuals.
Scarlett Lyn Gomez, an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Francisco and director of the Greater Bay Area Cancer Registry, said the NCI has been interested for at least 10 years in improving its ability to track the burden of cancer in patient populations of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities.The cancer registry was a logical place to start because that's what they were prepared to do, she said.
"It's been a nice but good progress," said Gomez."But now, personally, I think we are completely backwards."
The decision not to include canger patients suffering from cancer is only one of the changes that are being registered under Trumis directing efforts for health care and state health institutions.HHS orders to reduce funding and funding for cancer marketing funds and NCI programs.Scientists say that CDC funding has not been cut;However, the White House's Fiscal 2026 budget seeks to eliminate funding for the National Cancer Registry program.
Other transgender-focused Trump administration actions include canceling research grants for LGBTQ+ health research, closing the National Institutes of Health's Office of Sexual and Gender Minority Health, and suspending specialized services for LGBTQ+ youth at the 988 suicide prevention line.
Without the data, scientists can't support research that might help trans patients, Gomez said.— deleted.
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