Transgender vs Transgenic Mice: Row Over Trump's Animal Experiments Claim

US President Donald Trump addressed a joint session of Congress this week and highlighted multiple examples of "appalling waste" funded by American taxpayers by the administration led by his predecessor, Joe Biden. 

During the 99-minute address on Tuesday, he claimed that the billionaire Elon Musk's government cost-cutting team, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has identified that the Biden administration spent $8 million on "making mice transgender".

"This is real," he said to laughter from his fellow Republicans.

Critics, however, challenged his claim and said the funding was meant for health studies that involved transgenic mice, not transgender mice, receiving treatments. Studies were conducted to figure out how these treatments might affect the health of humans who take them.

Transgenic mice are genetically modified mice that have had foreign DNA introduced into their genome, a process that is typically done to study the function of specific genes, model human diseases, or test potential treatments. 

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

Citing examples that these studies exceeded $8.2 million, the White House said that $455,000 was spent on a study to test differences in the ways an HIV vaccine worked in mice that had received cross-sex hormone therapy.

It also said the National Cancer Institute awarded $299,940 to a project to compare breast cancer rates among female mice and those receiving testosterone therapy.

The White House said that $3.1 million was spent to investigate how hormones influence asthma outcomes, $2.5 million to examine 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 affects the microbiome in mice.

These projects, however, didn't involve physically transitioning mice from one gender to another and were aimed at figuring out the effects of hormones on disease, reproductive health, and immune responses.