Did President Donald Trump confuse research on transgenic mice with research on "making mice transgender," when addressing Congress, as some social media users suggested? A day later, on March 5, 2025, the White House issued a press release restating that Trump discussed "$8 million spent by the Biden Administration 'for making mice transgender.'" "Transgender" and "transgenic" are two different terms with different meanings. Here is what we know so far.
A suggestion appeared in a post (archived here) published on X March 5, 2025. It opened:
TransGENIC, you fucking idiot.
This is what the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Wed Mar 5 17:40:19 2025 UTC)
The entry on X cited a fragment of Donald Trump's address before Congress, which aired live on TV on March 4, 2025. At the 1:42:22 mark, he said, referring to the federal spending:
Just listen to some of the appalling waste we have already identified.
At the 1:43:13 mark, Trump continued:
Eight million dollars for making mice transgender... This is real.
When Lead Stories reached out to the White House via email and over the phone on March 5, 2025, a spokesperson did not initially offer a clarification on whether the president meant "transgenic" or "transgender" or where the figure of $8 million came from.
Later on the same day, the White House issued a more detailed press release about it, and it restated that Trump referred to:
$8 million spent by the Biden Administration 'for making mice transgender.'
While similarly sounding, the two terms -- "transgender" and "transgenic" -- are not the same.
The website of the National Human Genome Research Institute (archived here) reads:
Transgenic refers to an organism or cell whose genome has been altered by the introduction of one or more foreign DNA sequences from another species by artificial means. Transgenic organisms are generated in the laboratory for research purposes.
The CDC website (archived here) explains that "transgender" is a different category:
Persons who are transgender have a gender identity that differs from the sex that they were assigned at birth (333,334). Transgender women (also known as trans women, transfeminine persons, or women of transgender experience) are women who were assigned male sex at birth (born with male anatomy). Transgender men (also known as trans men, transmasculine persons, or men of transgender experience) are men who were assigned female sex at birth (i.e., born with female anatomy). ... The term "cisgender" is used to describe persons who identify with their assigned sex at birth.
Lead Stories searched the database of research projects that received federal funding.
Some of the studies did mention "'trans' mice", but their purpose would be typically broader than gender transition itself. For example, one paper reads:
To understand the effects of feminizing sex hormone therapy on vaccination, we propose to develop a mouse model of gender-affirming hormone therapy, assess its relevance to human medicine through singe-cell transcriptome studies, and test the immune responses of "cis" vs. "trans" mice to a HIV vaccine."
A search for "transgenic mice" across that database produced numerous studies about various diseases and health conditions, and when Lead Stories sorted the list from most expensive to least expensive projects for all years, the first page didn't even show mentions of gender-affirming care in the titles of the papers:
(Source: Reporter.nih.gov screenshot taken on Wed Mar 5 18:14:18 2025 UTC)
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