The White House is doubling down on President Trump’s recent claim suggesting the Biden Administration spent more than $8 million “making mice transgender.”
The rodent remarks came during the president’s address to Congress on Tuesday, as he highlighted all the wasteful federal spending uncovered by the Department of Government Efficiency, including the millions of dollars allegedly put toward transitioning mice.
“This is real,” Trump emphasized, triggering a prompt response from the fact checkers at CNN.
The network initially speculated the president was referring to a $477,121 pot set aside between 2021 and 2022 for different three projects aimed at better understanding how feminizing hormones can affect the immune system. They all involved testing on monkeys.
“The Fake News losers at CNN immediately tried to fact check it,” the White House fired back in a press release on Wednesday, “but President Trump was right (as usual).”
It then provided a list of $8.3 million in federal grants for six different health studies on the potential impacts of treatments used in gender-affirming care, all of which involved mice, according to the White House.
That list included $299,940 awarded by the National Cancer Institute in 2023 for a project examining breast cancer risk among transgender men. It involved comparing cancer rates among female mice and those receiving testosterone therapy.
An additional $455,00 was doled out by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to a study aimed at examining how gender-affirming care could impact the efficacy of an HIV vaccination.
A third study — awarded $735,113 — looked at how the gut microbiome could be interacting with hormone therapy, while another — granted $3.1 million — sought to better understand the effects of asthma in all people, including those who are transgender. A fifth study used $2.5 million to analyze how testosterone affects reproductivity in transgender men.
The rest of the pot, $1.2 million, went toward examining how hormones, like testosterone, influence the brain’s control of reproductive hormones and fertility. That study, however, relied on “transgenic mice” — which means the mouse had been genetically altered in some way — not transgender mice.
