The White House issued a press release Wednesday to defend President Donald Trump’s eyebrow-raising claim that the federal government had spent $8 million “making mice transgender” — but the research does not back them up.
The line about trans mice came during Trump’s joint address Tuesday, as he ran through a long list of federal spending that he considered wasteful.
“This is real,” Trump said of the mice.
But because he did not elaborate, theories on what the president was talking about proliferated online, with many people theorizing that he had misunderstood the scientific term “transgenic,” which involves alteration of an organism’s DNA. That does not appear to be the case.
The White House says the $8 million figure was reached by adding up the cost of six separate studies involving mice.
Mice, of course, do not have gender identities, making Trump’s claim untrue on its face. Scientists can inject sex hormones into lab mice to help them learn more about elements of human biology, like the reproductive system or the endocrine system.
The first study aimed to evaluate how gender-affirming care may impact the efficacy of an HIV vaccination, potentially helping scientists better design such a vaccine. The second sought insights on how testosterone affects reproductive function in transgender men. A third was interested in breast cancer risk among transgender men. A fourth looked at how the gut microbiome could be interacting with hormone therapy. The fifth sought to better understand female sex hormones and reproductive function in transgender men, and the sixth sought to better understand asthma in all people, including trans folks.
The total came to $8,290,053.
But researchers were not “making mice transgender” for the sake of it — they were trying to help the scientific community build on its knowledge of human beings. The National Institutes of Health spends billions annually to fund health studies.
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The White House trashed “the Fake News losers at CNN” for an initial, mistaken attempt to fact-check Trump’s claim last night, after the network speculated that he was referring to a study involving hormone therapy on monkeys.
According to the White House, “President Trump was right (as usual).”
To date, many of the Trump administration’s claims about savings identified by billionaire Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency have proven false or misleading.
