10 ms·

Also of note because of recent political choices, these are humanized mice, meaning they're transgenic. They have a human ACE2 gene instead of the mouse ACE2 ge

• timr 2y ago
  There's absolutely no problem with research on transgenic mice. Certain groups have been trying to claim that the US president confused "transgenic" and "trans(sexual|gender)" in his speech last week, but that is incorrect. There really was a series of government-funded studies concerning gender in mice [1,2]. [1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/03/yes-biden-spent-millions-on-transgender-animal-experiments/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/03/yes-biden-spent-... [2] Just to be clear: I have no opinion on this research, nor am I suggesting that it is wasteful. I'm just pointing out that the entire meme of "Trump confused transgenic har har har" is factually incorrect, and also deeply ironic.
  • bigmattystyles 2y ago
    The way they complain about it though, it seems to me that they think mouse studies are done for the sake of mice. ‘Crazy woke liberals want to make even mice transgender.’ Is the whistle they’re blowing.
    • timr 2y ago
      Our political discourse is especially stupid right now, and it is bi-partisan.
      • HeatrayEnjoyer 2y ago
        Drop the "both sides" falsehood.
        • timr 2y ago
          So far, there there are multiple replies to my comment arguing with me about something I didn't say (i.e. "the cited studies don't have anything to do with making mice transgender"). So yes, both sides are so eager to score points that they don't even bother to read anymore.
          • soco 2y ago
            [flagged]
            • redeux 2y ago
              I agree with your point but I don’t think using pejoratives helps others receive your message.
            • timr 2y ago
              The comment I was responding to said/implied that transgenic research is somehow politically prohibited now. This is simply false, and no amount of hand-wringing about what the president meant is relevant to the question I was addressing. The one thing that is absolutely undebatable is that he wasn't talking about transgenic research, yet somehow that has become the meme.
      • zimpenfish 2y ago
        It's bi-partisan in the way that a paper cut is bi-partisan to having your leg dissolved off with acid.
      • coeneedell 2y ago
        Really difficult to argue that “both sides are equally to blame for the bad discourse” when one side had a mob of terrorists storm the capitol (then pardoned all of them) and the other side held up tiny signs during a speech.
        • naasking 2y ago
          Or instead of making a bad faith comparison of partisan violence, you could compare it to the George Floyd protests which injured over 700 police officers and killed over 20 people.
          • xerox13ster 2y ago
            And in which case did the party leader stand up and incite the mob before they went on their war path? If we’re going to compare January 6 to the George Floyd riots, one was explicitly political, and the other one was fed up populace. One started with a rally intended to gas the mob up in hopes of securing the capital for their fuhrer. The other was started as the result of the outright murder of an individual by a state actor. One was essentially organized by the Republican Party leader, and the other was an impromptu display of discontent.
            • Auracle 2y ago
              There were quite a few Democrats that encouraged the protests that turned into riots during the George Floyd stuff. That's literally exactly the same as Trump. He encouraged a protest, but literally told them to peacefully protest, just as many of those Democrats did.
              • xerox13ster 2y ago
                And for how many of them were the protests formed around the Democrat politician? How many Democrats: got up on stage for a rally for themselves then -> told the attendees to go and “peacefully protest” then -> the protestors went and turned into a riot? How many of the George Floyd protesters were chanting to hang a public official? With the intent of dismantling democracy? These are not the same.
    • ImHereToVote 2y ago
      We can find against the crazy right by making even more extreme strawmen.
  • fumeux_fume 2y ago
    You're kinda splitting hairs here which lends me to believe you also fail to grasp the reality of the situation. We have no idea if Trump really knows the difference between the words transgenic and transgender, but we know that these studies are mostly--if not completely--focused on aspects other than simply changing the sex of the mice. If I had to guess, the grant proposals probably contained enough woke buzzwords to make them appear to be such. source: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-transgender-mice-medical-research-1235289439/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-tr...
    • redeux 2y ago
      I think we should be beyond giving the Trump regime the benefit of the doubt. They’ve shown repeated and obvious malicious intent. I think it’s more likely that they cherry picked this study because they believed that their rubes would fall for it. I doubt Trump himself knows anything about the study.
    • whimsicalism 2y ago
      Splitting hairs? The original comment implied that studies on transgenic mice were becoming politically verboten, which is unambiguously false. Only because it somewhat goes against one anti-Trump narrative do we now accuse the commentator of “splitting hairs”/being overfocused on details. Sorry, but details-obsession is part of Hacker News for you. Trump does more than enough idiotic things, I’ve never understood the desire to just make up things about him.
  • aredox 2y ago
    It is correct, as the White House's childish response doesn't address "making mouses transgender" at all, and this was Trump's claim.
    • Galatians4_16 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • watwut 2y ago
        That is what the buffoon wants - he wants to be able to enact his policies without any checks and complain from anyone. So that he can threaten to annex Canada and then blame Canada for responding. So that he can actively help Russia without that being pointed out. So that he can waste California water and then blame democrats when it is missing in the summer.
        • chrsig 2y ago
          maybe spend the time talking to his voters?
          • panja 2y ago
            Unfortunately that has never been successful for me. You can't reason a person out of a position they didn't reason themselves into in the first place.
          • throwanem 2y ago
            Oh, you'd just a few months ago never have believed how geopolitically measured and sensible a lot of them are lately starting to sound. Nervous, too. They might not mostly be ready to admit how bad they fucked up, but the fact of it is fast dawning on them and a lot of them, at least in my broader circles, are starting to get scared. Too late, sad to say.
          • watwut 2y ago
            It does not matter, because I as a human do not matter to those people. Harm to me is benefit for them. I am tired to being insulted and being told things I am 100% sure are lies. Can we please stop pretending that some kind of nice rational discussion can be a solution to anything here? I cant convince them, because Rogan, Trump, Musk, Vance, Bannon and the whole apparatus of republican party wins by lying and creating false outrages.
  • thowawatp302 2y ago
    None of the titles of studies provided on that page support the assertion that the money was spent “for making mice transgender.”
    • timr 2y ago
      ...I didn't say they did? Not sure why you're arguing with me. I just said that there's no "confusion" between these things and transgenic mice.
    • GolfPopper 2y ago
      Yep. There's some immense "the Leader can never be wrong" energy with the response to the (factually inaccurate, and thus untrue) "transgender mice" line in Trump's address to Congress. Any remotely sane administration, faced with something similar, would just put out a statement about how a speechwriter made a mistake, the intent was different than the exact wording used by the President, and let it go. Instead, various lackeys are left to performatively scramble and media outlets are under pressure, all to find some twisted interpretation under which he can retroactively have been right all along. Madness reminiscent of Orwell's writing. It makes you wonder, happens if he says "pi is 3"?
      • s1artibartfast 2y ago
        The interesting part is that many people correctly understood exactly what Trump meant with his language the first time. For those people, it is the left that is twisting the words and factually incorrect ( e.g. Trump did not mix up transgender and transgenic). Using poetic or lose language is rhetorical style that trump has employed since the first term. Trump keeps doing it because the feeble response makes it a winning tactic. For many people, Trump comes out looking like the sane one when he calls a mouse on HRT a trans mouse, and the rebuttals are "The studies weren't about gender in mice because, gender being a social construct, mice don't have it" or scientists weren't "putting mice in drag and asking them their pronouns."
        • GolfPopper 2y ago
  • Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    Their wording is very convincing that they are correct, too: > The Fake News losers at CNN immediately tried to fact check it, but President Trump was right (as usual).
    • Toutouxc 2y ago
      I had to double check this was really posted on whitehouse.gov.
      • falcor84 2y ago
        I'm really sad about this. I'm ok with the use of clear and even fully colloquial language by officials, but find myself mourning this total loss of decorum. I grew up believing that our officials should strive to be role models. I feel that by shirking this expectation, the current administration is eroding a central pillar of government as a concept.
        • dragonwriter 2y ago
          > I grew up believing that our officials should strive to be role models. They are striving to be role models, and they are role models for their followers, and this is clearly visible in changea in social interactions...
        • Tostino 2y ago
          I always rolled my eyes a bit about the decorum calls when anybody would get a little rowdy. I don't know, I seem to find a little bit of profanity and pointed name calling an entirely different thing than an all out assault on truth and reason.
          • tw04 2y ago
            The point of decorum is is that a devolution of language tends to result in an escalation of aggression which frequently ends in physical violence. You generally don’t hear someone screaming “with all due respect I must disagree” before shooting someone.
  • evil-olive 2y ago
    > There really was a series of government-funded studies concerning gender in mice this is true...in the sense that if you make a list of government-funded studies, and ctrl-F it for "gender", and then ctrl-F that list for "mice", you get a non-zero number of results. of the $8 million they're claiming, $3.1 million went to “Gonadal hormones as mediators of sex and gender influences in asthma” so...they're studying asthma. using mice. who are given hormones. this is pretty far from the "they're making mice transgender" talking point. if you read the abstract that they link to [0]: > Starting around puberty and peaking during mid-life, women have increased asthma prevalence and higher rates of asthma exacerbations than men. Causes of these disparities remain unclear; however, studies have shown that sex-specific inflammatory mechanisms controlled by hormones contribute to differences in airway reactivity in response to environmental stimuli. Despite this, experimental models of asthma have not explored the contributions of sex hormones to inflammatory mechanisms in the female and male lung asthma affects men and women differently, and they want to figure out why. specifically, they're trying to isolate the affects of hormones on lung tissue. that seems like a worthwhile subject to me? a simplistic understanding of biology would be that lungs are lungs, and the same between men and women. refining that understanding seems like a good goal for basic research to pursue. if you continue reading the abstract, oh my god they mention that trans people exist > and no studies have explored the effects of feminizing hormone therapy with estrogen in the lungs of trans women but...this just seems to me like the scientific method? they're trying to eliminate as many uncontrolled variables as they can: > In Aim 2, we will study the contributions of estrogens to HDM-induced asthma outcomes using male and female gonadectomized mice treated with estradiol if you want to study the effects of sex-specific hormones, it seems logical that you would neuter them first, so that they're not producing any hormones of their own, they're only receiving the ones that you inject them with. so you have female mice, with ovaries removed, who are receiving replacement female hormones. and male mice, with testes removed, who are also receiving female hormones. if you want to call that "transgender mice", sure, knock yourself out. what I see is just a scientific experiment where they're tried to eliminate as many uncontrolled variables as possible. now, why are they only doing it with female hormones (estradiol)? why aren't they doing the opposite experiment where the male and female gonadectomized mice are given testosterone? I don't know for certain, but the most likely explanation is that testosterone is a controlled substance in the US (due to its use by weightlifting bros), and so doing experiments with it would be more difficult because of the increased legal requirements. 0: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10891526 https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10891526
  • toddmorey 2y ago
    It's still bullshit. For example, the last cited study ($3 million of their claimed $8 million) aimed to find out why asthma is so much more prevalent in women than men and learn more about gender-specific inflammatory mechanisms. Being scientists, they saw an opportunity to study the contributions of estrogens to HDM-induced asthma outcomes. SHOCKING AND SCANDALOUS.
  • whimsicalism 2y ago
    Not really worth fighting it on these issues in forums like HN anymore, they’re becoming reddit-ized and tribal. People will probably read your comment as an endorsement/defense of Trump rather than the factual clarification it is.
    • timr 2y ago
      This comment thread is indeed pretty depressing.
  • tonnydourado 2y ago
    The studies weren't about gender in mice because, gender being a social construct, mice don't have it. *Some* of the studies were about the potential physiological effects of hormone therapy. They used mice, but the point was to study how humans are affected by HRT. The way the article is written makes it sound like they're putting mice in drag and asking them their pronouns.
    • CamperBob2 2y ago
      gender being a social construct, mice don't have it. You have to be careful there. Plenty of individual animals in the wild exhibit social behaviors that we would associate with unconventional gender roles if they were humans. There are known evolution-based rationales for many if not most of these behaviors, and it's safe to say there are unknown evolution-based rationales for the rest. We're not special.
      • krapp 2y ago
        Homosexuality is not transgenderism. A homosexual man can still identify as a man and be attracted to men. Being attracted to a man doesn't make them equivalent to a transwoman. Also conventional gender roles change over time, and vary by culture, because gender is performance. It used to be conventional for men to wear high heels and makeup and kiss each other on the mouth, and sexual relationships between men weren't always considered transgressive of masculine norms.
        • CamperBob2 2y ago
          Yep, all very true. I spent most of my childhood believing that homosexuality was unnatural, inherently sinful, and entirely unique to humans, because that's the spiel that the local Southern Baptist preachers were selling. The same is true for things we call "gender roles." Some male animals act in ways we once reflexively associated with females of their species, and vice versa. I'll edit the comment to remove the reference to homosexuality, though, because that point wasn't especially clear or useful.
    • s1artibartfast 2y ago
  • consteval 2y ago
    It makes zero sense to claim Trump was referring to transgenic mice because nobody cares about that, regardless of political affiliation. He attempted a bit of misinformation, which characterizes most of his address. Certainly, his supporters interpreted it to mean transgender mice. IMO, this was deliberate. If it wasn’t deliberate, then Trump is just an idiot. If it was deliberate, then he’s purposefully spreading misinformation in pursuit of some culture war. No matter how you cut it, it reflects very poorly on our president.