Trump Claimed the NIH Spent $8 Million 'Making Mice Transgender,' Which Is Actually Partly True
The NIH has given numerous grants to researchers who have used animal models, including mice, to study the impacts and safety of cross-sex hormones. But nobody is "making mice transgender."
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 today in the Washington Post: “Science needs more shrimp on treadmills: National Institutes of Health isn’t funding too much silly science. It’s not funding enough.”
My essay 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 what’s known as 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 come from.
As a longtime Shakespearean, I’m especially happy that my editor let me slip a reference to Twelfth Night into the text:
“So if silliness by the proxy for edge science, play on — give us excess of it.”
(Here’s a tweet of my editorial if you’d care to share it.)
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
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 on 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 conceive of their gender identity in the first place. (Cue people yelling at me that there’s no such thing as gender identity in humans either. Sorry folks, there is.) 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 calls 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
$66,000 for: “Cross-Sex Steroid Therapy and Cardiovascular Risk in the Transgender
$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
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.
So 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 tumpeted the sensationalistic headline: “Biden administration spent millions creating transgender animals to experiment on.”
During the current congress, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) has run a splashy one-woman campaign to attack transgender people in the name of feminism. This has included a successful effort to get Rep. Sarah McBride, who is Congress’ first openly trans member, kicked out of the Capitol ladies’ room.
On Feb. 6, Ms. Mace 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 Feb. 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 Sept. 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.
The Likely Next NIH Head Calls Out Pediatric-Gender-Medicine Researchers For (Allegedly) Hiding Null Findings
More gender news came out of Dr. Bhattacharya’s confirmation hearing on Wednesday.
The Stanford health economist and I have enjoyed a lively correspondence in recent years after he saw how my reporting about monkeypox was driving the same kind of scorn that he weathered for his Covid stances. I interviewed him in the spring:
During Dr. Bhattacharya’s hearing, Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) referred to the $10 million that the NIH has granted over time to a research team led by Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. In particular, Mr. Tuberville referenced one of the papers that study has produced, published in 2023, which reported that out of 315 youth treated with cross-sex hormones and followed for two years in a recent study, two died by suicide.
has deconstructed that paper, called Chen et al, thoroughly:Mr. Tuberville called those suicides “devastating” and asked Dr. Bhattacharya, “So how can we ensure the NIH doesn’t grant funds to things like this?
Dr. Bhattacharya didn’t take the bait and vow to cancel the grant altogether, as the Trump administration and DOGE would clearly like him to do. Instead, he made reference to another study that this grant funded, which followed a small cohort of children that received puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria. In October, The New York Times reported that Dr. Olson-Kennedy had said that she was withholding publishing null findings from that study for political reasons.
Dr. Bhattacharya said:
Well, first of all, I think if you have a negative result and it’s politically inconvenient to you, usually you have an obligation to scientists report it, right? So the NIH funds a study that shows that the gender transition doesn’t reduce suicide rate among adolescents. There is an obligation report, even though she [Dr. Olson-Kennedy] may think it’s politically inconvenient. So I want to make sure that NIH research is required to report even negative results. And there's ways to do that we can talk about.
You may also recall that Dr. Olson-Kennedy was recently sued by a former patient who detransitioned:
It’s important to note that Dr. Olson-Kennedy gave a sworn statement to a U.S. District Court in South Carolina in November asserting that the Times had mischaracterized her words. She said it was false to claim that she had withheld scientific findings about puberty blockers for political reasons.
Lastly, on the Olson-Kennedy theme, a source leaked to me 14 hours of training videos that Dr. Olson-Kennedy, her husband Aydin, and other colleagues recently provided in their methods for treating youth with gender dysphoria. It’s taken me a long time to wade through the materials. But in the coming weeks, I plan to start posting Substacks about these trainings, along with the full videos so anyone can use them as a reference.
Do subscribe to my Substack to get alerts about the videos! Many thanks.
I am an independent journalist, specializing in science and health care coverage. I contribute to The New York Times, The Guardian, NBC Newsand The New York Sun. I have also written for the Washington Post, The Atlantic and The Nation. Follow me on Twitter: @benryanwriter and Bluesky: @benryanwriter.bsky.social. Visit my website: benryan.net
Nancy Mace made this comment about “transgender mice” a month ago. While “making mice transgender” is obviously an oversimplification of these studies, she was pretty clearly talking about gender affirming models of treatment on mice. Nitpicking over whether someone can actually turn a mouse (or any organism) transgender, completely misses more important points. Bringing up transgenic mouse studies when there’s no evidence that’s what anyone was actually trying to talk about just makes the complainers look like morons.
If anything we should be funding longitudinal studies on the humans who have already received this treatment.
It's going to be hard to resist spending the next few weeks compulsively refreshing my email waiting for those Olson-Kennedy articles you have lined up to arrive....