They’re transitioning the mice! They’re transitioning the rats!
This commentary is a repost from “Sex on Wednesdays” by Martha Kempner on Substack. Find her other articles on The Queen Zone here.
Where’s DOGE when you need them? I have a perfect example of government waste that could be cancelled before we piss away money on it, but that seems unlikely since it was just announced last week and appears to be an RFK Jr. wet dream.
Apparently, the CDC is going to conduct yet another study on whether vaccines cause autism. The study—if allowed to use legitimate scientific methods and report actual results—will find that vaccines do not cause autism. How do I know that? Because we’ve already wasted decades—and millions of dollars—refuting one study that was… wait for it… entirely made up.
I’m sure you’re all sick of me ranting about vaccines, so I’m going to make this one short. In 1998 British “researcher” Andrew Wakefield came out with a “study” of 12 kids with developmental delays, eight of who he claimed had autism. He “concluded” that the MMR vaccine was the reason. Four years later, the same researcher did another study of 75 kids and came to a similar conclusion but cited different (also dubious) reasons.
In the years since, dozens of studies involving millions of children have looked for the link and no one else has found it.
Why?
Bad Fiction Makes For Lucrative Bed Fellows
I’m just guessing here, but it might have to do with the fact that it was a fiction created for financial gain. Wakefield had invested in a new kind of MMR vaccine and was hoping to discredit the existing one to make his more popular. He has since admitted to fabricating the data in that original study and pulling the conclusions directly out of his own rear end. As a result, Wakefield had his medical license revoked and got to go to Trump’s first inaugural ball.
A new CDC study that finds nothing might seem like a harmless waste of money even if it sticks out like a sore thumb amid the rhetoric of ending government overspending. But it’s dangerous anyhow. Every study on this topic lends credence to the possible already disproven connection. As we’ve learned too many times in recent years, even definitive results can’t stop the power of, “Wait, didn’t I hear that vaccines cause autism?”
Trump, Trans Mice, and a Fundamental Failure to Grasp Science
But instead of saving money on studies we don’t need, Trump and DOGE are going after studies they don’t understand. In his official address to Congress last week that no force on earth could have made me watch, Donald Trump talked about studies on transgender mice. More specifically, he blamed the Biden administration for spending $8 million “making mice transgender.”
That’s not how it freaking works on two entirely different levels.
We know from his inane definition that Trump doesn’t get the difference between sex and gender in people, but mice make it simple. They have a biological sex that is based mostly on their rodent DNA and their tiny little peckers (or lack thereof). Like people, mice can be born intersex. But mice don’t have an internal sense of being male or female because their brains are the size of a pea. Gender is at least partly a social construct, and the mice I’ve met have not been smart enough to grasp that. (To be fair, I’m irrationally afraid of all things rodent, so I’m usually too busy running away and screaming to even attempt an intellectual conversation. Maybe mice have a deep inner life that I’m not giving them credit for.)
Yes, humans have done experiments on mice that seek to discover the roles hormones play in sex/gender/reproduction/cancer/Parkinson’s/whatever by giving a male mouse some estrogen or pumping a female mouse full of testosterone, but I assure you this wasn’t about making them trans. Yes, we’ve done experiments with/for/about transgender people, and some of them might have had a mouse component. But in true Trump fashion, it looks like neither of these are the categories of which he spoke.
Many Trump watchers believe that his comments on transmice represent confusion about the difference between transgender and transgenic. (They’re transitioning the mice, they’re transitioning the rats.)
The Science of Transgenic Mice vs. Trump’s Transgender Mice Confusion
In the early 1970s, scientist figured out that you could put foreign (i.e. human) DNA into the nucleus of a fertilized mouse egg and that the resulting rodent would have that DNA in every cell and all of their tissue. This was considered a major scientific breakthrough because it makes the mice more human-like and therefore more valuable for studying human genetics. Transgenic mice can be used for research on diseases like osteogenesis imperfecta, sickle-cell anemia, and ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease).
When they were called out on their scientific semantic slip-up, the Trump administration doubled down. They put out a press release lambasting the woke liberal media for making fun of their leader titled “Yes, Biden Spent Millions on Transgender Animal Experiments.” Their release offers a list of studies that include the word transgender and/or mice and add up to approximately $8 million dollars. I can’t help but wonder whether this was the original list that they added up before the speech or if some poor intern was sent to the library after the fact. Either way, it will not come as a surprise that none of the listed studies is about making mice transgender (or making transgender mice).
Some of the studies are about using mice to learn more about transgender humans like whether HIV treatments are impacted by hormone therapy and what could be done to mitigate breast cancer risk. The largest study on the list, however, was about asthma. Yes, transwomen were included in the study along with cisgender men and women. And yes, the researchers did use mice. But the goal of the study was to “investigate the mechanisms by which estrogen triggers inflammation in the male and female asthmatic lung.”
We can all sleep better knowing that DOGE put a stop to that (unless, of course, we’re having an asthma attack).
You May Want To Read: RFK Jr.’s HPV Vaccine Lawsuits: Who Really Stands to Profit?
