What People Get Wrong This Week: the Transgender Mice Study
Last week, President Trump spoke for an hour and 40 minutes before a joint session of Congress to announce, among other things, America’s comeback. The nation’s rejection is too subjective to fact-check, but other statements Trump made during the speech were less emotional – such as the claim that the US has spent millions of dollars on research into transgender mice.
“Just listen to some of the horrific waste that we’ve already exposed,” Trump said in his speech, before rattling off a laundry list of things the US allegedly paid for, such as “scholarships for diversity, equity and inclusion in Burma” and “free housing and cars for illegal aliens.” He ended the list with a particularly eye-catching item: According to Trump, the US spent “$8 million making mice transgender.”
“This is real,” he added.
But is this true?
Donald Trump says a lot of things, but research on transgender mice is not just an empty phrase. It’s important enough to the administration’s philosophy that prominent Republicans have been circulating videos on social media denouncing ” transgender animal research ,” the White House has issued a statement on the issue , and this weekend, in an interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo , Trump said, “Transgender surgery on mice – hundreds – I mean, the money they spend on all of this. It’s all a scam.”
I have a feeling we’ll be hearing a lot about transgender mice over the next few years, so I decided to take a look at Trump’s statement and get to the bottom of the science behind transgender mice.
Has Donald Trump confused “transgenic” with “transgender”?
Shortly after Trump’s speech, many people online said that Trump had confused the word ” transgenic ” (“an organism or cell whose genome has been altered by artificially introducing one or more foreign DNA sequences from another species”) and the word ” transgender ” (“a person whose gender identity does not match the sex assigned to it at birth”).
Transgenic mice are commonly used in medical research. By altering their DNA, scientists can create mice with specific biological or biochemical characteristics that they would like to study. As far as we know, mice have no idea about their identity, so technically they can’t be transgender . However, Trump doesn’t seem to mince his words. He didn’t mean transgenic. He meant “transgender,” as the White House press release makes clear.
Did the National Institutes of Health really spend $8 million to make transgender mice?
At the most basic level, Trump’s claim that we are spending money to “make mice transgender” is false. None of the research, later called wasteful by his administration, was designed to make mice transgender, as Trump suggests, and many people seem to believe it.
Instead, these studies aimed to approximate gender-affirming hormone therapies in mice so that we can better understand how these therapies affect things like HIV vaccine effectiveness and breast cancer risk in humans .
Do we do transgender surgery on mice?
Trump may not confuse transgenics with transgender people, but he is wrong when he says the US spends money on “transgender surgery on mice.” We don’t do that. Doctors have been successfully performing gender confirmation surgeries on people for over 100 years, so there is no need for mice.
None of the studies listed in the White House press release involved surgery on mice either. Instead, they all involved injecting animal models with testosterone or estrogen to approximate the hormone therapy often provided as part of gender grooming.
If Trump had said that the US “wasted” $8 million on research into the effects of hormone treatments, which are often part of gender-affirming care, he would have been more honest.
Why the emphasis on mice?
If the Trump administration rightly believes that scientific research involving “transgender mice” is ostensibly wasteful, it will have to cut a lot . Monitoring hormone levels in laboratory animal models is common in endocrinology, in studies of everything from menopause to osteoporosis to male pattern baldness, but only studies focusing on transgender health were included in Trump’s list.