Trump Confuses ‘Transgender’ Mice With ‘Transgenic’ Mice, Used To Study Cancer, In Attack On Biden Administration Science Funding

Alessio AtriaMarch 13, 2025, 7:32 pmNews >

President Donald Trump confused transgenic mice with transgender mice while asserting that Joe Biden‘s administration spent $8 million to create them. On March 4, Trump made this claim during his joint address to Congress, which included many protests from Democrats.

The president asserted that the Biden administration spent “$8 million for making mice transgender.” However, critics rejected his claim and said the funding was intended for health studies that involved transgenic mice, not transgender mice, receiving treatments. Studies were done to determine how these treatments may impact the health of humans who take them.

Transgenic mice have had foreign DNA introduced into their genome. This DNA turns into every cell and tissue in the mouse.

The White House later declared that, under the Biden administration, the National Institutes of Health spent millions of dollars to perform “transgender experiments on mice.”

It pointed to examples of studies that went beyond $8.2 million. For example, it said that $455,000 had been spent on a study to test differences in the ways an HIV vaccine worked in mice given cross-sex hormone therapy.

The White House also noted that the National Cancer Institute gave $299,940 to a project to compare breast cancer rates among female mice and those being given testosterone therapy. It mentioned that $3.1 million was spent to determine how hormones affect asthma outcomes.

Officials also said that $2.5 million was spent to discover the reproductive consequences of steroid hormone administration, $1.2 million to analyze androgen effects on the reproductive neuroendocrine axis and $735,113 for a study on how gender-affirming hormone therapy impacts the microbiome in mice.

These projects did not center around physically transitioning mice from one gender to another and were focused on finding out the effects of hormones on disease, reproductive health and immune responses.

The most common method for making transgenic mice is pronuclear microinjection, where a DNA construct holding the desired gene is injected directly into the pronucleus of a fertilized mouse egg. The egg is then implanted into a surrogate female mouse to grow into a transgenic offspring.

The process involves carefully harvesting donor eggs, preparing the DNA construct, microinjecting the DNA, and transferring the injected eggs to a quasi-pregnant female for development.

Transgenic mice are used in laboratories to study human diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s, create treatments and understand gene function in skeletal muscle physiology and tissue-specific expression.