NIH ‘transgender’ animal testing experiments more extensive than Trump said

The government’s spending on “transgender mice” runs even deeper than President Trump let on in his speech to Congress.

New numbers from the White Coat Waste Project, shared with The Washington Times, show that the National Institutes of Health is funding at least 26 projects, totaling $64 million, to manipulate animals’ sex organs and sex preferences with the hope of benefiting the transgender community.

That includes nearly $10 million sent to the Oregon Health and Science University to study whether gay rams can be forced to prefer ewes as sexual partners through prenatal infusions of testosterone.

Researchers told NIH that rams were the perfect test subjects because about 8% of rams prefer sex with other rams, and they have physiological differences associated with this preference.

At Tulane University, researchers have collected $11.2 million from NIH to implant testosterone-releasing capsules into female mice to study their vascular health. They said it would help scientists understand how testosterone treatments affect aging women and transgender male patients who used androgen therapy.

Justin Goodman, the project’s senior vice president of advocacy, called the spending “symptoms of an epidemic of reckless spending at the NIH.”

“We’ve actually found tens of millions more in active NIH grants wasted to create transgender lab animals, including a $1.1 million DEI grant to overdose trans rats on a sex party drug,” he told The Times. “The sickness of reckless government spending on animal testing has spread so badly that it can’t be cured with a scalpel, only with a chain saw.”

Mr. Trump mocked the line of research during his address to Congress on Tuesday. He complained about the government spending “$8 million for making mice transgender.”

“This is real,” the president said.

That claim drew howls of outrage from media fact-checkers. CNN flatly declared Mr. Trump’s claim false and said its reporters couldn’t find the research.

Hours later, CNN had to retract and acknowledge that Mr. Trump was right about the $8 million, although the network said his claim “needs context.”

The White House got its pound of flesh. It called CNN “fake news losers” and declared that “President Trump was right (as usual).”

They pointed to a half-dozen NIH projects revealed by the White Coat Waste Project that used altered mice to study questions relating to transgender people’s health.

By Wednesday, after the speech, Mr. Trump’s budget-cutting office, the Department of Government Efficiency, announced that NIH had canceled seven grants involving “transgender experiments on animals.”

Internet denizens complained that Mr. Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency were mixing their terminology and the animals weren’t transgender but rather transgenic. That means they have had their genomes altered.

In the Oregon ram experiments, the researchers said they had “extensive expertise” in manipulating rams’ brain functions to alter sexual attraction.

“The proposed studies will illuminate essential hormonal, neural and cellular mechanisms that activate the fetal reproductive axis, and will contribute to our understanding of underpinnings of brain sexual differentiation, especially in relation to sexual partner preferences,” the Oregon researchers said.

The ram research dates back to 2000 and totals $9.7 million. The current award of $431,662 was issued in 2023 and is active through this summer.

“This basic science research is designed to understand core processes in order to expand overall knowledge of biology,” said Erik Robinson, a communications specialist for Oregon Health and Science University.

He said lead researcher Charles Roselli recently retired and his work “is now available for other researchers and the public to learn from and build upon.”

He took issue with Mr. Trump’s words: “Not sure what’s meant by transgender mice, but researchers are involved in transgenic animal models, meaning genetically modified to carry a human gene.”

Some grants were small dollars, such as Johns Hopkins University’s $49,000 to use transgenic mice to study how transgender males recover from wounds.

Schools argue that the criticism can be misleading because the research is often intended to study more general health issues, and the transgender aspects are only part of it.

Tulane’s study, which will be worth $14 million by the time it’s completed, implanted mice with testosterone-releasing capsules to study female cognitive aging. The researchers said the transgender aspect was another benefit.

“These findings indicate that increases in testosterone may impact vascular health, which may be important clinically for transgender men, women using testosterone for fitness or reduced libido, as well as patients with polycystic ovarian syndrome,” the researchers said in publishing their work.

The White Coat folks said not all the NIH grant summaries they flagged mentioned altering animals’ sexual characteristics, but it was clear from the researchers’ published findings that they were conducting those experiments.

That includes nearly $7 million sent to the University of Michigan, which used mice to study how transmasculine “pubertal suppression” affects the Achilles tendon.

The University of Virginia has received $2.2 million for studies that include using mice transitioning from female to male to determine whether they could still carry a pregnancy if they paused their hormone therapy.