Did the NIH Spend $8 Million ‘Making Mice Transgender’?
The uproar over ‘transgender mice’ reveals more about politics than research.
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About the Author
Benjamin Ryan is an independent journalist, specializing in science and health care coverage. He has contributed to The New York Times, The Guardian, NBC News and The New York Sun. Ryan has also written for the Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Nation, Thomson Reuters Foundation, New York, The Marshall Project, PBS, The Village Voice, The New York Observer, the New York Post, Money, Men’s Journal, City & State, Quartz, Out and The Advocate.
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A version of this article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
At his bombastic speech before Congress on Tuesday evening, President Donald Trump boasted that Elon Musk and the DOGE gang had exposed $8 million in federal funding “for making mice transgender.”
I examined this eyebrow-raising moment in an editorial I published Thursday in the Washington Post, which sings the praises of what’s sometimes known as “silly science.” The classic example is a study of shrimps scurrying on a treadmill, one that former Republican Senator Tom Coburn first made a fuss over in 2011. The meme makes routine resurgences, including a mention by iconoclastic Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya at his Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday for his appointment as head of the National Institutes of Health.
Silly science, I write, is oftentimes just a proxy for edge science, or early-stage exploratory research. And edge science is vital, because while much of such research hits a dead end, it’s where many of the profitable ideas of tomorrow will emerge.
As for the nugget in Trump’s speech about these supposedly transgender mice, it predictably sent progressive fact checkers into a tizzy. They were apparently too incredulous that Trump might be onto something so, well, silly to actually check their facts before they pounced.
One immunologist on X insisted that the president had daftly confused “transgender” with “transgenic” where these mice are concerned. Transgenic mice, which are widely used in scientific research, are genetically engineered to have, for example, a humanoid immune system for studying HIV.
Additionally, former Senator Al Franken posted on X that political scientist Norm Ornstein had told him about Trump’s supposed mixup between transgender and transgenic rodents. The SNL alumnus was quite certain that there was nothing to this whole transgender-mice business.
On Wednesday, Rolling Stone insisted in a banner headline: “TRUMP DECRIED MILLIONS SPENT ‘MAKING MICE TRANSGENDER.’ IT WAS CANCER AND ASTHMA RESEARCH.”
In the article, the magazine joined the chorus musing that perhaps Mr. Trump’s team, after running a keyword search for anything transgender-related to excise from NIH spending, might’ve clumsily hoovered up “transgenic” mice in the process.
As they scrolled through the list of $8 million in cumulative NIH grants that the White House insisted in a Wednesday press release proved Trump had told no lies about transgender mice, Rolling Stone focused on one study concerning asthma and another on chronic lung disease.
Then the magazine reported that the Trump administration did, in fact, report a couple of research endeavors that at least followed a transgender theme:
Of the highlighted research that does address transgender health, there’s a $300,000 analysis of breast cancer risk for female-to-male trans individuals taking testosterone. Again, the mice used for clinical purposes did not undergo gender transition.
A single entry, pegged at $455,000, was for HIV researchers looking at the immune response of mice who had been given cross-hormone therapy, which is perhaps the closest the list gets to an example of “making mice transgender.” Clearly, however, that was not the ultimate objective of their work.
It certainly appears that the president’s anti-DEI forces simply flagged a random selection of National Institutes of Health material that included some combination of hormones, mice, gender, and words with the prefix “trans,” then rolled this all up into the dumbed-down talking point Trump used on Tuesday night.
As for the Trump administration, with their trademark acerbic flair, the White House communications folks scoffed in their press release about the transgender mice: “The Fake News losers at CNN immediately tried to fact check it, but President Trump was right (as usual).”
But concerning the question of whether any NIH scientist had ever turned a mouse trans, CNN is actually right and the White House is wrong. In an article CNN posted on Wednesday, it reflected on the transgender-mouse NIH grants that the White Houses diagrammed in its release: “The studies were meant to figure out how these treatments might affect the health of humans who take them, not for the purpose of making mice transgender.”
That’s precisely it. There’s no such thing as “turning a mouse transgender.” Because for any animal to be transgender, it would require a sophisticated enough, humanoid cognition to be able to comprehend the notion of a “gender identity” in the first place. I’m sorry, but mice are simply not clever enough to decipher Judith Butler’s famously opaque sentences.
So the whole concept of turning mice trans is, indeed, ridiculous—even silly.
However, Rolling Stone is also wrong to dismiss in their ALL CAPS HEADLINE the fact that Trump’s statement about transgender mice, while misleading, was actually onto something. The body of the magazine’s article only proved this.
Researchers often look to mouse models when investigating drugs, vaccines, and other pharmaceutical interventions. There are all kinds of transgenic mice that have been genetically engineered for particular research purposes. And the NIH has funded many studies that use mice to help them understand the safety and health impacts of providing cross-sex hormones to humans—meaning giving testosterone to females and estrogen to males.
These studies are important, because they provide a model in which to study these drugs that permit study designs that might not be feasible or ethical in human research, or would be forbiddingly expensive or time consuming. Or they otherwise provide preliminary suggestions about how an ultimate study in humans might turn out.
In their effort to ban pediatric gender-transition treatment, statehouse Republicans have focused on what they characterize as the weakness of the science backing such interventions and the associated safety concerns. So it’s worth noting that conservatives’ efforts to ban research in this field and to cancel grants for animal-model studies might call into question the sincerity of their expressed concerns about the quality of the research evidence. Where are the calls on the right for more research into gender-transition treatment?
Then there’s the fact that many people do not think animal-based research is ethical. That includes the White Coat Waste Project, a nonprofit devoted to combatting the use of animals in research. It appears that this organization can be credited with first bringing this whole “transgender mice” brouhaha to the fore.
Staffers of the nonprofit sleuthed around in federal records and produced a nine-page roster of 10 NIH grants totaling $10 million for which at least part of the research in question went toward animal-model research, including in mice, of cross-sex hormones.
This included all the studies the White House mentioned in their release on Wednesday, plus the following (click the hyperlinks to access the original federal information on the grants):
$442,000 for: “Molecular Mechanisms of Hormone-Mediated Sex Differences in Wound Healing”
$66,000 for: “Cross-Sex Steroid Therapy and Cardiovascular Risk in the Transgender Female”
$1.1 million for: “GHB Toxicokinetics: Role of sex hormone dependent monocarboxylate transporter regulation and potential for altered overdose risk in transgender men and women.” GHB is better known as the “date rape drug” and is also popularly used recreationally for sex by gay men and trans women in particular.
$49,000 for: “Understanding how chromosomal makeup and cross-sex hormone administration affect wound healing in mice”
On Wednesday, I exchanged emails with Justin Goodman, who is a public-policy senior VP for the White Coat Waste Project. He sent me the following spreadsheet of studies that he said include at least some animal-model component and concern cross-sex hormones. (Note that one should not presume that all the cumulative $64.2 million is going to that specific type of research within these grants.)
I told Mr. Goodman over email, “I would differ with your characterization of these being transgender animal experiments, which implies that an animal can have a transgender identity. Rather, these are studies of the safety and impacts of cross-sex hormones using animal models, including mice.”
Mr. Goodman was not pleased with my assertion. “Your partisanship is blinding your judgment and common sense,” he said.
I told him that people on the flip side of this debate say that about me all the time as well.
Ultimately, he said we should agree to disagree.
“Regardless of what you want to call it, we are just happy we saved animals from being tortured in deadly taxpayer-funded experiments,” Mr. Goodman said.
How did these mouse studies end up in Trump’s speech?
The Washington Examiner published an article centered around the transgender-mice dossier from the White Coat Waste Project on December 21. The conservative news outlet’s take on the matter was similar to what Trump’s would be. The Examiner trumpeted the sensationalistic headline: “Biden administration spent millions creating transgender animals to experiment on.”
On February 6, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) held up the White Coat Waste Project’s dossier in Congress. As reported in Fox News:
Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., laid out the misuse of taxpayer money funding “gender-affirming care” for animals during opening remarks at a subcommittee hearing Thursday. The hearing, “Transgender Lab Rats and Poisoned Puppies: Oversight of Taxpayer Funded Animal Cruelty,” featured a witness from the White Coat Waste Project.
“Last year, the White Coat Waste Project exposed more than $10 million in taxpayer funds that were spent creating transgender mice, rats and monkeys,” Mace said.
Ms. Mace repeated this claim on Laura Ingraham’s Fox News show on February 20. As she enthused that Elon Musk and DOGE were ferreting out waste in federal spending, Ms. Mace said, “And I just uncovered the other day, you know, over $10 million spent on making animals trans.” (See the 2:30 mark in the video below.)
So that brings us to Trump’s March 4 speech. You can see how this game of political telephone apparently caused his speech writers to include the misleading—yet essentially accurate—line about $8 million in spending on what he called “transgender mice.”
The reaction to this claim on the left and in Rolling Stone in particular echoed the response to Trump’s assertion during his September 10 debate with Kamala Harris: “Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.” Certain reporters presumed that such a bonkers claim couldn’t possibly be true, and so they didn’t bother to fact check Mr. Trump’s claim before declaring it false.
Except that it was true.
As Andrew Kaczynski reported for CNN the day before the debate, Ms. Harris had responded to a 2019 ACLU questionnaire given to Democratic presidential candidates by saying that she supported taxpayer dollars going to gender-transition surgeries for ICE detainees. (Such surgeries are extremely rare in this context.) This would continue to haunt Ms. Harris throughout the campaign and is one reason why leading moderate Democrats recently called for a moratorium on candidates filling out questionnaires that might serve as purity tests.
In the end, the fracas over “transgender mice” reveals more about our polarized politics than it does about the merits of scientific research. Progressives too quickly dismissed Trump’s claim as absurd without digging into the facts, while conservatives seized on a sensationalized talking point to score political points, even at the risk of undermining valuable research.
Both sides would do well to step back from the tribal brinkmanship and let science—including the messy, exploratory work of “silly” edge research—proceed without the taint of partisan agendas.
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NOW we have to fund these experiments to prove the harms to children?! After the harms to children have been widely done?
You could make this argument if these studies had been done before the kids were harmed. But now we don’t need mice. We have children to show us.
How is this not clear?