transgenicism

The lies — unsurprisingly — continue. If I were to have to stand up and write about every single egregious one, I’d surely die at my keyboard, so I’ll be limiting myself to the ones I can thoroughly debunk on my lonesome.

What happened? Donald J. Trump needed an enemy to moralize about, and he figured out he could roll them together into one mega-enemy, like, eight years ago. His favorite rhetorical mega-enemy lately has been government spending on transgender people, even indirectly. During his disastrous address to a joint session of congress, Trump alleged that the “Biden administration” was funding eight million dollars’ worth of “transgender mice” research. He was immediately called out for how bonkers, absurd, and lacking factual support this claim was; leading to a press release digging the hole further. I’m actually going to go line-by-line down this one, so my head stops hurting.

FACT: Under the Biden Administration, the National Institutes of Health doled out millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded grants for institutions across the country to perform transgender experiments on mice.

ACTUAL FACT: Rodent models of transgender health are less than two years old, meaning the Biden administration (and Trump’s first administration) almost certainly funded their creation, as well as experiments using them. This is good, because transgender people receive healthcare too. Rodent models are a necessary step in therapy development, period, and the moralizing over the availability of computational tools by Republicans conveniently leaves out the fact that those tools fucking suck and are operated by their cronies. Even if you don’t buy that, the in vivo vs. in silico debate is one to be had by people in the field — the ethical dimension is already handled by IACUC.

On the question of whether or not these mice can be said to be truly transgender? Fuck no. If they have any relevant internal awareness, they’re probably feeling quite dysphoric. You’ll notice all these experiments are investigating areas that don’t really call for more nuance here.

$455,000: “A Mouse Model to Test the Effects of Gender-affirming Hormone Therapy on HIV Vaccine-induced Immune Responses” (Duke University)

This study was undertaken to examine whether or not testosterone affected the ability of the body to respond to the HIV vaccine. $455,000 is an extremely — arguably, exceedingly — reasonable price to pay for such research. For one thing, you’re trying to prevent cases of HIV. If you need more than that, rot.

$2,500,000: “Reproductive Consequences of Steroid Hormone Administration” (University of Michigan-Ann Arbor)

Congratulations, dipshits. The study found that “[t]hese mice manifest defects in ovarian architecture and have altered folliculogenesis.” Not only did they just torpedo something that would have been a very effective talking point for them — given how reproductively obsessed these perverts are — you just defunded an extremely comprehensive, well-organized effort that may have taught us more about what chronic combination birth control does to us.

Evil, and stupid.

$299,940: “Gender-Affirming Testosterone Therapy on Breast Cancer Risk and Treatment Outcomes” (“BETH ISRAEL DEACONESS MEDICAL CENTER”)

Breast cancer is a leading cause of death in industrialized society, which is why yearly decreases in the mortality rate of breast cancer are a goal of both the CDC and WHO. It is not a goal of the Trump administration, however.

$735,113: “Microbiome mediated effects of gender affirming hormone therapy in mice” (Emory University)

You know, this is one of those that even I look at and go “Huh…. okay.” But I don’t go out and make policy based on going “Huh… okay.” because I am a reasonable person. Additionally, the gut microbiome is multitudinously linked to mental health — a fact that, no doubt, played a role in funding this. Of course, if I woke up tomorrow and read RFK Jr. denying germ theory, I would not be surprised — if only such idiocy was the simple cause of this shit.

You may be noticing by now that these are all mostly at really good institutions, too. I have no clue what to even say to that. Just ridiculous.

$1,200,000: “Androgen effects on the reproductive neuroendocrine axis” (UCSD) “Aim 2 utilizes transgenic mice to test whether male-level androgens acting via AR specifically in kisspeptin neurons are necessary and/or sufficient for androgen inhibition of in vivo LH pulse parameters, including pulse frequency, and the estrogen-induced LH surge.”

This was meant to be foundational mechanistic work outlining how the administration / possession of chronic high levels of androgen agonists — like testosterone — to individuals with XX chromosomes impedes their ability to reproduce. Beyond explaining why trans men on hormones cannot have children, work like this tends to produce a myriad of insight into the actual pathways behind all of this inside your body — this is stuff that could help develop treatments for infertility, for example (the study authors say this themselves, too). The would-be authors also point out that cisgender female individuals can present with prohibitively high testosterone, too — this research would have improved their healthcare as well.

$3,100,000: “Gonadal hormones as mediators of sex and gender influences in asthma” (Indiana University) “We will study the contributions of estrogens to HDM-induced asthma outcomes using male and female gonadectomized mice treated with estradiol…”

This is functionally a study on HDM-induced asthma, that’s pretty much it. HDM means, of course, house dust mite. Where the people at IU had the gall to contravene the future administration while applying for their grant is, of course, in evaluating transgender male/female mice models in addition to cisgender male and female mice.

Truly, even investigating transgender people in your experimental paradigm at all is enough to get your meticulously-planned-and-executed project thrown out the window, completely wasting all of the allocated funds that had already been disbursed. For those who don’t know, these grants are applied for years in advance, with your specific budgetary requests for every year the experiment proceeds planned — haggled over, really, directly with the NIH no less in rounds and rounds of grant review — meaning the administration is only recuperating the cost of undisbursed years and the numbers illustrated in the press release are almost certainly wildly inflated. And yes, I’ve been treating every grant listed as canceled; I guarantee you they are, and if they haven’t been yet, funds are not flowing from them. The investigation of cisgender female rodents alone has been enough to trigger this, which makes more sense when you remember it is fucking ChatGPT analyzing these instead of human beings.

Blueaghe. Ouaghege, even.