Trump’s “transgender mice” were part of asthma and cancer research
But also: transgender mice are probably a good idea anyway.
One memeable moment from U.S. president Donald Trump’s unsettling remarks to congress this week was claiming that the fraud and wasteful spending his administration had cancelled included $8 million in research grants going towards making “transgender mice.” To prove the ridiculous claim, the White House published a list of the six grants in question.
They probably should have double-checked their work.
One of the grants was investigating why women suffer more from asthma than men — estrogen was being given to mice to see if that was causing it. Other studies were investigating similar hormone effects in breast cancer and HIV treatments.
A particularly head-scratching inclusion seems to have been the result of misunderstanding the word “transgenic,” which means an organism that has been genetically modified to have DNA from another species — a common practice to make tests on lab mice potentially more applicable to humans.
Cut first, ask questions later: On the surface, this seems to be another instance of the Trump administration and DOGE not fully understanding the programs they are blindly slashing, like when it laid off staff in charge of managing the U.S.’s nuclear weapons.
The new list looks like someone did a Ctrl+F for various gender-y terms, not realizing that “hormones” and “gender-affirming” come up in science and medicine beyond the realm of gender transition.
But as Rolling Stone suggests, it could have been at least a little bit purposeful — spending millions on transgender mice is the kind of claim that gets right-wing misinformation cycles whipped into a fervour.
Okay, but also: Let’s say that the U.S. was funding experiments to “make mice transgender” — would that be a bad thing? One common excuse from those seeking to ban gender-affirming treatments for young people is that the long-term effects of things like hormone replacement therapy and puberty blockers are unknown. Wouldn’t more research help put those fears to rest?