OPINION:
As a pediatric psychiatrist who treats transgender children, I’ve been closely following the controversy over “transgender mice.” President Trump’s claims are true, and ending this wasteful spending will benefit humans and lab animals.
In his address to Congress on March 4, the president said the federal government wasted “$8 million for making mice transgender.” A few days later, in a Fox News interview with Maria Bartiromo, he again criticized federal spending for “transgender surgery on mice.”
Liberal press, late-night comedians and “Saturday Night Live” have called the president’s pronouncements fake news. Sen. Cory A. Booker, New Jersey Democrat, supposedly a champion for animal rights, called Mr. Trump’s transgender animal testing remarks “bizarre lies.” Various online critics said transgender mice can’t be real because “mice can’t tell you their gender.”
It’s no surprise that some people thought these wild accounts of taxpayer waste must be fake, but evidence shows that this so-called research is real. That’s why CNN and Forbes, after initially trashing Trump, were forced to issue corrections, admitting they got it wrong.
White Coat Waste Project, a nonpartisan nonprofit group, continues to expose these cruel and unnecessary animal experiments. One University of Michigan study funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation reported “using an established mouse model of transmasculine gender-affirming hormone therapy.” It went on to describe how “female-born mice were assigned to experimental groups to mimic gender-affirming hormone therapy in human adolescents.”
A 2024 Emory University experiment, funded by five grants from the NIH and the Department of Veterans Affairs, also claimed “to model male-to-female transition” by castrating young male mice and injecting them with estrogen. “To model female-to-male transition,” they injected young female mice with testosterone. In these experiments, the medically transitioned mice were eventually killed and dissected to examine the effect of the hormone therapies on their bodies.
I’ve provided medical care for many transgender children over the past several years. They are a diverse group of patients dealing with a wide range of psychological and physical issues. There is no way an artificially created “transgender mouse model” can begin to represent the challenges these children face.
That didn’t stop NIH from funding a horrific animal study at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, purportedly to investigate the effects of puberty blockers on the physical and mental health of transgender adolescents. In this experiment, mice that had received injections of puberty blockers were subjected to extreme stress, including electric shocks and swimming until they drowned. They were killed after being subjected to this cruel treatment, and their brains were cut out.
This inhumane animal study was partly funded by a federal grant meant to “promote diversity in health-related research.” That money would have been far more helpful to transgender adolescents if it had been spent on research of real situations that they face in their everyday lives, none of which can be accurately represented by oversimplified “models” using intentional animal torture. Human and rodent brains are light-years apart.
Fortunately, after the president’s criticism of useless transgender animal experiments like these, the Department of Government Efficiency cut several of the NIH-funded grants uncovered by White Coat Waste Project’s investigation. White Coat Waste Project has uncovered dozens of other active grants still funding transgender animal tests, and they are heroes to taxpayers and animals for shining light on this waste and abuse.
With attention from Elon Musk; Sens. Joni Ernst, Iowa Republican, and Ted Cruz, Texas Republican; Reps. Nicole Malliotakis, New York Republican, and Nancy Mace, South Carolina Republican; and Mr. Trump, hopefully, it’s only a matter of time before DOGE announces that every single grant funding transgender animal testing has been canceled.
There’s no reason that Mr. Trump and his detractors should be fighting about this one. Everyone should be celebrating efforts to eliminate the abuse of animals in outdated and useless taxpayer-funded experiments.
• Dr. Sujatha Ramakrishna is a pediatric psychiatrist in Kanab, Utah.
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