Last week, President Trump spoke for an hour and 40 minutes before a joint session of Congress to announce, among other things, that America was back. The nation’s backness is too subjective to fact check, but other statements Trump made during the speech are less vibe-centric—like the claim that the U.S. has wasted millions of dollars on transgender mouse research.
“Just listen to some of the appalling waste we have already identified,” Trump said at the address, before reeling off a laundry list of things the U.S. has supposedly paid for, such as “diversity, equity, and inclusion scholarships in Burma” and “free housing and cars for illegal aliens.” He capped off the list with a particularly attention-grabbing line item: According to Trump, the U.S. has spent “$8 million on making mice transgender.”
“This is real,” he added.
But is it?
Donald Trump says a lot of things, but transgender mouse research isn’t a throwaway line. It’s important enough to the administration’s governing philosophy that prominent Republicans have spread clips decrying “transgender animal studies” on social media, the White House has released a statement on the issue, and this weekend, in an interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo, Trump said, “Transgender surgery on mice—hundreds of—I mean the money they’re spending on all of this stuff. The whole thing’s a scam.”
I have a feeling we’re going to be hearing a lot about transgender mice over the next few years, so I thought I’d take a look at Trump’s claim and get to the bottom of transgender mouse science.
Did Donald Trump mix up “transgenic” with “transgender?”
Soon after Trump’s speech, many people online claimed that Trump had mixed up the word “transgenic” (“an organism or cell whose genome has been altered by the introduction of one or more foreign DNA sequences from another species by artificial means”) and the word “transgender,” (“a person whose gender identity does not correspond with the sex registered for them at birth”).
Transgenic mice are commonly used in medical research. By altering their DNA, scientists can create a mouse with the specific biologic or biochemical features they’d like to study. As far as we know, mice don’t have any concept of their own identities, so they can’t technically be transgender. Trump doesn’t seem to have been mixing up the words, though. He didn’t mean “transgenic.” He meant “transgender,” as this White House press release clearly states.
Did the National Institutes of Health really spend $8 million making mice transgender?
Taken at its most basic level, Trump’s assertion that we are spending money on “making mice transgender” is false. None of the studies later identified by his administration as wasteful were undertaken with the goal of making mice transgender as Trump suggests, and many people seem to believe.
Instead, these studies were aimed at approximating gender-affirming hormone therapies in mice so that we’d have a better idea of how these therapies affect things like HIV vaccine efficiency and breast cancer risk in humans.
Are we doing transgender surgery on mice?
Trump may not be mixing up transgenic and transgender, but he is wrong when he talks about the U.S. spending money on “transgender surgery on mice.” We don’t do that. Doctors have been successfully performing gender-affirming surgeries on humans for over 100 years, so there’s no need for mice.
None of the studies listed on the White House’s press release include performing surgeries on mice either. Instead, they all involved injecting animal models with testosterone or estrogen in order to approximate hormone therapies often given as part of gender-affirming care.
Had Trump said the U.S. “wasted” $8 million researching the effects of the hormone treatments often given as part of gender-affirming care, it would have been more honest.
Why the focus on mice?
If the Trump administration legitimately believes scientific research that involves “transgender mice” is wasteful on its face, they have a ton of cutting to do. Controlling the hormone levels of laboratory animal models is common in endocrinology, in studies of everything from menopause, to osteoporosis, to male pattern baldness—but only studies focused on transgender healthcare were included on Trump’s list.