Of (Transgender) Mice and (Also Transgender) Men

There was a minor kerfuffle after the State of the Union where Trump’s communication team doubled down on a claim that the Biden administration spent millions of dollars turning mice trans. Many people in the media and on social media laughed off the initial comments saying that the President had mistaken “trans” for transgenic.

The White House released a statement insisting that Biden spent eight million dollars transgending the mice and that the “Fake News Losers” at CNN had gotten it wrong. They listed six grants the NIH had awarded and their titles.

I’m going to tell you why Trump’s defense is horseshit. I’ll go even further and tell you why getting lost in petty debunking squabbles like this is pointless. That doesn’t mean cede the territory to Trump. It means don’t get bogged down in debate. Eyes on the prize.

$455,000: “A Mouse Model to Test the Effects of Gender-affirming Hormone Therapy on HIV Vaccine-induced Immune Responses”

$2,500,000: “Reproductive Consequences of Steroid Hormone Administration”

$299,940: “Gender-Affirming Testosterone Therapy on Breast Cancer Risk and Treatment Outcomes”

$735,113: “Microbiome mediated effects of gender affirming hormone therapy in mice”

$1,200,000: “Androgen effects on the reproductive neuroendocrine axis”

$3,100,000: “Gonadal hormones as mediators of sex and gender influences in asthma”

If you look at the grants, it’s pretty clear that where “transgender mice” appear they aren’t a goal, they’re a means to asking specific scientific questions. As funny as it would have been for Biden to have created a swarm of Warhammer 40K Adeptus Soritas figure painting, electronic music producing, gay furry computer hacker mice, it simply didn’t happen.

The Biden administration wasn’t approving grants for murine gender-affirming care or figuring out how best to trans the mice. When the mice were subjected to hormone replacement, it was to model how hormones work in humans.

Mice in medical research are treated like little laboratories, modeling what happens in human bodies. We’ve used mice to study every organ system. Processes like aging, pregnancy, obesity, addiction, and wound healing are all studied in mice. Almost every cancer treatment and pharmaceutical gets tested in mice first.

If by some miracle, mice don’t get the kind of disease we want to study, we breed or genetically modify them until they do. I literally cannot overstate how much medical research is done in mice.

Our reliance on mice actually causes a fair bit of attrition in the drug development pipeline. Mice aren’t human. What works in a mouse often does not work in a human.There’s an entire Twitter account dedicated to appending “In mice” to the end of science news stories about medical breakthroughs.

But that’s not what’s going on here. Three of these grants (2, 5 and 6) are generally studying the effect of sex hormones on different aspects of health. The other three are using mice to study trans health issues. Having a 50% hit rate on your “debunk” is pretty shitty and smacks of general scientific illiteracy.

It is a mistake to let the Trump administration have any grace or presumption of good faith in anything much less science. This is the administration that fired entire divisions of the FDA, CDC and NHS today. The FOIA office of the CDC was totally purged. HHS is run by an antivaxxer who thinks that measles outbreaks in the US are normal. NOAA is being stripped for parts. Universities are being threatened for studying things Trump doesn’t like and for student speech he doesn’t like.

At a minimum this conduct is an attack on our collective ability to study our world, to find treatments and cures, to save lives. You don’t owe the administration, or its cronies, the benefit of the doubt. They’re tossing a generation of scientists out of the lab and black-bagging immigrant grad students. Ignore their ad hoc justifications. Don’t assume they’re doing this in good faith even if a study, or a grant sounds weird.