Following President Donald Trump’s claims earlier this week that the Biden government allocated $8 million so that scientists could attempt to make mice transgender, people have been left to try and figure out what exactly he’s talking about.
Experts quickly realized that Trump was likely confusing “transgender” with “transgenic,” which refers to mice that have had foreign DNA mixed with theirs. It’s primarily done with human DNA, so that experiments can be conducted to see how certain medications or illnesses interact with the rodents, and thus teach us more about how they might affect humans.
Fortunately, on Friday, Rachel Maddow was on hand to clear up any confusion, opening her segment by laughing at how few viewers Trump’s speech to Congress had (it was the least viewed of all of his addresses). Maddow continued, “I know you didn’t watch. But one of the things he said in his speech was that one of the terrible, liberal things that his top campaign donor had discovered was happening in government was research to make mice transgender.”
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She went on to explain, “Actually, it’s transgenic mice. And transgenic mice are used in all kinds of laboratory research because mice are transgenic when they have been genetically altered so you can study human illnesses and conditions in them, even though they’re mice.”
She finished with, “It is transgenic mice, you numbskulls. But sure, go ahead and shut down all the labs studying all the diseases because what are you, 5?”
The Trump administration has only doubled down on its claims about transgender mice, publishing an article to the White House website on March 5 outlining all of the funding that went to “perform[ing] transgender experiments on mice,” including $2.5 million on studying the reproductive consequences of steroid hormone administration, or $3.1 million on examining gonadal hormones as mediators of sex and gender influences in asthma.
Of course, anyone who thinks about this for longer than five seconds will realize that these studies are being conducted on mice for the benefit of humans, not as part of some scheme to turn mice transgender (or frogs gay).
Snopes explained that one of the linked studies does include research regarding gender-affirming health care, but the study also notes that the research “will have direct implications for understanding [breast cancer] risk and open up new avenues of treatment for cisgender men and women as well.”
Scientific research that benefits everyone, including one of the smallest minorities in the United States? That’s apparently un-American.
