Did President Donald Trump get mixed up about mice used in medical research and whether they’re transgender or transgenic?
When President Donald Trump addressed Congress on March 4, he set a new record for the longest speech given before that body. Some have argued he also made an embarrassing blunder when speaking about examples of government waste. When he referred to research spending on laboratory mice, did he mean transgender or transgenic?
During the speech, Trump listed several examples of alleged wasteful spending Elon Musk has found. Musk, who owns X, is serving as an advisor to the Trump administration. In that role, he’s heading the Department of Government Efficiency, an unofficial “agency” designed to cut wasteful spending.
If one were to attempt to borrow another line from Trump’s speech, one might refer to Musk as an “unelected bureaucrat.” But that’s a post for another day.
Trump lays out a bill of particulars
But consider this passage from Trump’s speech on wasteful spending “discovered” by Musk’s team:
Just listen to some of the appalling waste we have already identified: $22 billion from HHS to provide free housing and cars for illegal aliens, $45 million for diversity, equity and inclusion scholarships in Burma, $40 million to improve the social and economic inclusion of sedentary migrants. Nobody knows what that is. Eight million million to promote LGBTQ+ in the African nation of Lesotho, which nobody has ever heard of, $60 million for indigenous peoples and Afro-Colombian empowerment in Central America, $60 million; $8 million for making mice transgender.
This is real.
Is it?
The first obvious question would be why is anyone spending that much money to make mice transgender? But it’s not hard to find mentions of a different word: transgenic.
Transgender or transgenic?
Both transgender and transgenic begin with the same prefix. It is a prefix from Latin that means “across,” “beyond,” or “on the other side of.” It can also refer to changing from one point to another.
Transgender means across or beyond the male or female sex. For a long time, most people have assumed there’s only male or female. There have always been examples of people born with sex characteristics of both genders. But more recently, transgender has come to mean relating to not feeling you belong to the gender reflected by your biological sex. Someone who is transgender may have been born with male sex characteristics but identifies as female, or vice versa. It can also refer to someone who has begun or completed the process of transitioning from one gender to another.
It’s one word with complex meanings. Context becomes critically important in understanding exactly what’s being expressed. (I’m going to come back to context in a few moments.)
Unfortunately, most people identify with the gender that matches their birth characteristics. This makes it difficult to comprehend what not feeling that way might entail. Even worse, too many who are not transgender refuse to even consider that point of view in any way.
Meanwhile, Merriam-Webster defines transgenic as “being or used to produce an organism or cell of one species into which one or more genes of another species have been incorporated.” It then gives an example of “a transgenic mouse.”
It isn’t the oldest of terms. In fact, the first known use of the adjective only dates to 1982. That wasn’t that long ago.
So what on earth are transgenic mice?
If you try to search science sites, you may be left to scratch your head from all the jargon.
The -gen- in transgenic refers to genetics. Combine the “across” or “beyond” meaning of trans and you begin to understand that we’re talking about changing genetics of one species, in this case a mouse, to at least mimic another. The other, in this case, is humans.
By altering a mouse’s DNA to add traits that more closely resemble human genes, scientists are able to get a better look at how disease affects us on a physiological level.
The National Institutes of Health has a page to explain how scientists use transgenic mice in Alzheimer’s disease research. Alzheimer’s is the most common form of dementia, though not all cases of dementia are specifically Alzheimer’s.
If you sort through the jargon even there, you decipher that transgenic mice can mimic “a range of Alzheimer’s disease–related pathologies.” While none of them fully duplicates conditions in humans, they are still helping researchers understand what’s happening in the brains of people with the disease.
Even better, they’re playing “a pivotal role in the development of immunotherapies for Alzheimer’s disease that are currently in clinical trials.”
That is to say, these genetically-modified mice may help scientists find either a cure or a more effective treatment for Alzheimer’s.
Researchers here are trying to create genetic changes, not gender changes.
One other note on hormones: both genders have male and female hormones. We associate testosterone with men and estrogen with women. But you will find both hormones in both genders.
For example, men have limited amounts of estrogen that perform critical functions in the male body, including regulating sex drive and controlling cholesterol levels and maintain bone and heart health. Men can suffer from low levels of either, though we most often hear of men suffering “Low T,” or a low level of testosterone. Some men who suffer from low levels of estrogen may need to take estrogen supplements. But that kind of hormone therapy is not about turning a man transgender.
So did Trump really misspeak?
Here’s where things get ridiculously complicated.
Remember I said I was going to come back to context? Let’s look at the context of Trump’s remarks and the context of the reaction to his word choice.
In the same paragraph, he’d already blasted as “appalling” programs that involve DEI and LGBTQ+ efforts. Whether he misspoke and meant to say transgenic rather than transgender, he was already on a theme. The reaction from the Republicans in the room was clearly anti-DEI, anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-transgender.
Vice President JD Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson both chuckled behind him, not at Trump’s apparent slip, but at the thought of making mice transgender.
CNN then called Trump’s claim that the government was spending the money for that purpose false. The White House responded with articles about the Biden administration’s efforts to experiment with hormone therapy in mice: the same kind of therapy used in transgender treatments.
But CNN then went on to provide context that the president didn’t. The procedures weren’t designed to make mice “transgender.” Instead, they involved injecting mice with treatments that can be used in gender-affirming health care. But the studies were meant to figure out how these treatments might affect the health of humans who take them. They’re using transgenic mice to see how hormone therapy might affect humans.
For example, one study set out “to compare breast cancer rates among female mice and those receiving testosterone therapy,” CNN reported. Another set out to “test differences in the ways an HIV vaccine worked in mice that had received cross-sex hormone therapy.”
Even so, the mice are being used to test human responses to the hormone therapy. Scientists aren’t spending the money to “turn mice transgender.” They’re using hormones to in transgenic mice to model how humans would respond.
Personally, I think testing that could help defeat diseases like breast cancer and HIV are reasonable uses of transgenic mice.
I would think most people would agree, no matter how they feel on the subject of transgender rights.
