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Comment by timr | Hacker News Reader

There's absolutely no problem with research on transgenic mice. Certain groups have been trying to claim that the US president confused "transgenic" and "trans(sexual|gender)" in his speech last week, but that is incorrect. There really was a series of government-funded studies concerning gender in mice [1,2].

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/03/yes-biden-spent-...

[2] Just to be clear: I have no opinion on this research, nor am I suggesting that it is wasteful. I'm just pointing out that the entire meme of "Trump confused transgenic har har har" is factually incorrect, and also deeply ironic.

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Their wording is very convincing that they are correct, too:

> The Fake News losers at CNN immediately tried to fact check it, but President Trump was right (as usual).

I had to double check this was really posted on whitehouse.gov.

I'm really sad about this. I'm ok with the use of clear and even fully colloquial language by officials, but find myself mourning this total loss of decorum. I grew up believing that our officials should strive to be role models. I feel that by shirking this expectation, the current administration is eroding a central pillar of government as a concept.

> I grew up believing that our officials should strive to be role models.

They are striving to be role models, and they are role models for their followers, and this is clearly visible in changea in social interactions...

I always rolled my eyes a bit about the decorum calls when anybody would get a little rowdy. I don't know, I seem to find a little bit of profanity and pointed name calling an entirely different thing than an all out assault on truth and reason.

The point of decorum is is that a devolution of language tends to result in an escalation of aggression which frequently ends in physical violence.

You generally don’t hear someone screaming “with all due respect I must disagree” before shooting someone.

Does make me wonder about the 18th and early 19th C, where the written language was very polite and formal but people regularly had duels and killed each other. But perhaps spoken language at the time was far less polite? What did Hamilton and Burr shout at each other in Weehawken, I wonder.

A formal duel following a set of rules is quite different than violently assaulting someone in a fit of rage.

> I grew up believing that our officials should strive to be role models.

This is what we tell our children until they get old enough to process the adult world. Reality is... "it's complicated, ____ (son/daughter name here)." Our leaders (at least in the US) haven't been real role models for probably centuries... reality is the whole "virtuous king" thing has been aspirational since the ancient Greeks.

> Our leaders (at least in the US) haven't been real role models for probably centuries...

Even when I disagreed with some of what he did (and didn't do), I absolutely can't recall a single time that I didn't admire the manner in which Obama spoke and behaved.

President hector dwayne mountain dew camacho strikes again.

While President Camacho is shown in a more theatrical light, what this character actually does on screen is

* find an expert who has apparently superior knowledge about a widespread problem afflicting his people

* immediately seek guidance from that expert and conscript him into solving that problem

* apply that guidance by directing resources to test the theory experimentally

* begin to hold that expert accountable when their experiment fails to follow that expert's predictions

* Stop seeking accountability and reverse course when it does produce results (despite this process being very public), and offer the expert the job of fixing more things.

Could you ask for more? Do you think the current democratic discourse is above or below this level?

Or non-democratic discourse for that matter. How did we deal with Lysenko's theories on crop yields?

It is correct, as the White House's childish response doesn't address "making mouses transgender" at all, and this was Trump's claim.

None of the titles of studies provided on that page support the assertion that the money was spent “for making mice transgender.”

...I didn't say they did? Not sure why you're arguing with me. I just said that there's no "confusion" between these things and transgenic mice.

Yep. There's some immense "the Leader can never be wrong" energy with the response to the (factually inaccurate, and thus untrue) "transgender mice" line in Trump's address to Congress.

Any remotely sane administration, faced with something similar, would just put out a statement about how a speechwriter made a mistake, the intent was different than the exact wording used by the President, and let it go.

Instead, various lackeys are left to performatively scramble and media outlets are under pressure, all to find some twisted interpretation under which he can retroactively have been right all along. Madness reminiscent of Orwell's writing. It makes you wonder, happens if he says "pi is 3"?

The interesting part is that many people correctly understood exactly what Trump meant with his language the first time.

For those people, it is the left that is twisting the words and factually incorrect ( e.g. Trump did not mix up transgender and transgenic).

Using poetic or lose language is rhetorical style that trump has employed since the first term. Trump keeps doing it because the feeble response makes it a winning tactic.

For many people, Trump comes out looking like the sane one when he calls a mouse on HRT a trans mouse, and the rebuttals are "The studies weren't about gender in mice because, gender being a social construct, mice don't have it" or scientists weren't "putting mice in drag and asking them their pronouns."

I don't think Trump is looking like a same person unless you consider a Trump hotel in Gaza sane. Do you?

Discussions that go in this direction remind me of the short story "Sort By Controversial" [1], about 'Scissor statements':

  "If you just read a Scissor statement off a list, it’s harmless. It just seems like a trivially true or trivially false thing. It doesn’t activate until you start discussing it with somebody. At first you just think they’re an imbecile. Then they call you an imbecile, and you want to defend yourself. Crescit eundo. You notice all the little ways they’re lying to you and themselves and their audience every time they open their mouth to defend their imbecilic opinion. Then you notice how all the lies are connected, that in order to keep getting the little things like the Scissor statement wrong, they have to drag in everything else. Eventually even that doesn’t work, they’ve just got to make everybody hate you so that nobody will even listen to your argument no matter how obviously true it is. Finally, they don’t care about the Scissor statement anymore. They’ve just dug themselves so deep basing their whole existence around hating you and wanting you to fail that they can’t walk it back. You’ve got to prove them wrong, not because you care about the Scissor statement either, but because otherwise they’ll do anything to poison people against you, make it impossible for them to even understand the argument for why you deserve to exist. You know this is true. Your mind becomes a constant loop of arguments you can use to defend yourself, and rehearsals of arguments for why their attacks are cruel and unfair, and the one burning question: how can you thwart them? How can you convince people not to listen to them, before they find those people and exploit their biases and turn them against you? How can you combat the superficial arguments they’re deploying, before otherwise good people get convinced, so convinced their mind will be made up and they can never be unconvinced again? How can you keep yourself safe?"

1. https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/

The studies weren't about gender in mice because, gender being a social construct, mice don't have it.

*Some* of the studies were about the potential physiological effects of hormone therapy. They used mice, but the point was to study how humans are affected by HRT.

The way the article is written makes it sound like they're putting mice in drag and asking them their pronouns.

gender being a social construct, mice don't have it.

You have to be careful there. Plenty of individual animals in the wild exhibit social behaviors that we would associate with unconventional gender roles if they were humans. There are known evolution-based rationales for many if not most of these behaviors, and it's safe to say there are unknown evolution-based rationales for the rest.

We're not special.

Homosexuality is not transgenderism. A homosexual man can still identify as a man and be attracted to men. Being attracted to a man doesn't make them equivalent to a transwoman.

Also conventional gender roles change over time, and vary by culture, because gender is performance. It used to be conventional for men to wear high heels and makeup and kiss each other on the mouth, and sexual relationships between men weren't always considered transgressive of masculine norms.

Yep, all very true.

I spent most of my childhood believing that homosexuality was unnatural, inherently sinful, and entirely unique to humans, because that's the spiel that the local Southern Baptist preachers were selling. The same is true for things we call "gender roles." Some male animals act in ways we once reflexively associated with females of their species, and vice versa.

I'll edit the comment to remove the reference to homosexuality, though, because that point wasn't especially clear or useful.

Not a Trump fan, but for many people including me, Trump comes out looking like the sane one when he calls a mouse on HRT a trans mouse, and the rebuttals are:

-"The studies weren't about gender in mice because, gender being a social construct, mice don't have it"

-Scientists weren't actually "putting mice in drag and asking them their pronouns."

-Trump confused transgenic mice with transgender mice

The last line makes you both seem foolish because he is confusing both terms.

It reminds me of historical elections where one candidate called the other homo sapiens and the ignorance of the public fell for it

How so? From my point of view it seems like the conflation lies with the critics.

The word he used was transgender, and the studies were all for transgender health in a mouse model.

Critics are the ones bringing transgenic into the conversation, which neither matches what he said, or the majority of the studies.

It is as if Bob called the ocean blue, but Sally claims Bob really meant red, while simultaneously pointing out he is wrong because the ocean actually blue. It is a really weak criticism.

A more coherent response is simply: "Studying transgender health in mouse models is important, and those studies were a good use of money"

Except that Trump is visibly insane in almost everyone of his interactions; and if we focus on the narrow topic of those mouse studies, their goal was to find ill effects of HRT - so scientists were literally looking for bad things HRT could cause.

> There really was a series of government-funded studies concerning gender in mice

this is true...in the sense that if you make a list of government-funded studies, and ctrl-F it for "gender", and then ctrl-F that list for "mice", you get a non-zero number of results.

of the $8 million they're claiming, $3.1 million went to “Gonadal hormones as mediators of sex and gender influences in asthma”

so...they're studying asthma. using mice. who are given hormones. this is pretty far from the "they're making mice transgender" talking point.

if you read the abstract that they link to [0]:

> Starting around puberty and peaking during mid-life, women have increased asthma prevalence and higher rates of asthma exacerbations than men. Causes of these disparities remain unclear; however, studies have shown that sex-specific inflammatory mechanisms controlled by hormones contribute to differences in airway reactivity in response to environmental stimuli. Despite this, experimental models of asthma have not explored the contributions of sex hormones to inflammatory mechanisms in the female and male lung

asthma affects men and women differently, and they want to figure out why. specifically, they're trying to isolate the affects of hormones on lung tissue. that seems like a worthwhile subject to me? a simplistic understanding of biology would be that lungs are lungs, and the same between men and women. refining that understanding seems like a good goal for basic research to pursue.

if you continue reading the abstract, oh my god they mention that trans people exist

> and no studies have explored the effects of feminizing hormone therapy with estrogen in the lungs of trans women

but...this just seems to me like the scientific method? they're trying to eliminate as many uncontrolled variables as they can:

> In Aim 2, we will study the contributions of estrogens to HDM-induced asthma outcomes using male and female gonadectomized mice treated with estradiol

if you want to study the effects of sex-specific hormones, it seems logical that you would neuter them first, so that they're not producing any hormones of their own, they're only receiving the ones that you inject them with.

so you have female mice, with ovaries removed, who are receiving replacement female hormones. and male mice, with testes removed, who are also receiving female hormones.

if you want to call that "transgender mice", sure, knock yourself out. what I see is just a scientific experiment where they're tried to eliminate as many uncontrolled variables as possible.

now, why are they only doing it with female hormones (estradiol)? why aren't they doing the opposite experiment where the male and female gonadectomized mice are given testosterone? I don't know for certain, but the most likely explanation is that testosterone is a controlled substance in the US (due to its use by weightlifting bros), and so doing experiments with it would be more difficult because of the increased legal requirements.

0: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10891526

This often happens:

1. X says that A did stupid thing B!

2. Y makes fun of X because obviously A didn't do stupid thing B.

3. Z (that's you) points out that A did a thing B', that is like B, only not stupid, but technically X described it accurately if tendentiously.

How do you deal with that? I don't think the human political brain is built for this level of indirection. But realistically this will now always be a fight between X's and Y's faction, because Z's position, though true, is too complicated to fit in a soundbite.

I don't know how we get back from that. If it were truth vs lies it would be manageable, but the truth isn't even on the table because it's too big to fit into the argumentative paradigm.

> 3. Z (that's you) points out that A did a thing B', that is like B, only not stupid, but technically X described it accurately if tendentiously.

It was not "technically described accurately" tho. It was a lie and comment you are responding to makes that clear.

So I think that response to that tactic would be to simply call it a lie rather then "technically accurate".

It's more accurate to say that "a paper studied gender in mice" than to say "no papers studied gender in mice".

edit: Nevermind I retract this. I think you're right about this paper in particular. I guess it comes down to whether a study involving weird things with gender hormones is "about gender"? But it still seems like the core debate is ultimately not very much attached to actual reality.

edit: It's like the "chemicals in the water that turn the freaking frogs gay" Alex Jones meme - if you thought "no that's nonsense there were no chemicals in the water" you would know less about Atrazine than Alex Jones did, despite Alex Jones also being wrong about what's going on with the frogs. The way in which you think that someone is wrong can also be wrong, even if that someone is in fact wrong.

the paper used the word "gender" completely unnecessarily, no? those are sex hormones.

It'd be fascinating - if considerably evil - to see if we could induce dysphoria in mice.

No. The studies are attempting to understand the effects of a specific human medical intervention called "gender-affirming hormone therapy" using mice as an analog. GAHT is an umbrella of treatments that includes more than just cross-sex hormones (e.g. transwomen often take testosterone blockers in addition to estrogen) so its a very reasonable use of 'gender' in context.

wait, I'm talking about the one linked upthread about asthma[1], and I think you are talking about this[2] one, right?

[1] Gonadal hormones as mediators of sex and gender influences in asthma - https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10891526

[2] A Mouse Model to Test the Effects of Gender-affirming Hormone Therapy on HIV Vaccine-induced Immune Responses - https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10849830

my apologies, I mixed up which thread I was looking at. In that study I think gender is used because they are including transgender women as a population of interest, so similar to the other example gender is an aspect of what they are attempting to study, and sex hormones are the means by which it is being studied.

> We expect that our studies would serve to develop potential sex- and gender-specific treatments and recommendations for dosage of therapeutic agents to treat and prevent asthma in cis and transgender women.

It may also be that "sex and gender" is used because it isn't actually known what causes the differences observed in the population and that gendered socialization, treatment, or preferences could be contributing factors. This study for instance found that girls were less likely to see a doctor or get diagnosed with asthma even when controlling for symptom severity.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ppul.20373

I love that Alex Jones example.

Atrazine is causing hermaphroditic frogs, chemically castrating them, and turning male frogs into behavioral females.

Trump often plays in a similar gray zone (e.g. dual meaning, hyperbole, simplification) with language because It is often a winning tactic.

Trump and Jones generate soundbites that cant be easily refuted with democratic soundbites. Overly simplistic rebuttals often end up even less accurate and more detached from reality.

I have given some thought to why this is, and I think it is for a few reasons. First, I think that democratic respondents don't share as much linguistic & conceptual framework with the target audience (e.g. a feminized male frog = a gay frog).

Second, and relatedly, I think rebuttals are afraid to engage with certain topics, and therefore end up tying themselves up in knots.

Last, is they have an oppositional defiant disorder where everything must be denied. "YES and" responses are off limits.

They cant just say "Yes, and poor chemical regulation is turning the frogs gay, and that is a bad thing"

I think it is more simpler. The actual message is not something about frogs and chemicals, it is "liberals are stupid and demented" or "gay are feminine losers" or "fear, liberals harm children". It is basically just exaggerated stereotypical schoolyard bullying, except with massive audience. When you analyze chemicals and hermaphrodism frogs in response, you area acting like a stereotypical nerd who does not understand the social situation or just does not have it in him to hit back.

The message is not scientific complain about frog, read message is that "we" should band up against "them" and collectively now bully this or that person/group. It is in-group bonding based on common enemy that is vilified.

You can not counteract that with rational rebuttal. That never works, not on schoolyard, not in work, not in politics. The whole things is about making people feel certain way.

> does not understand the social situation or just does not have it in him to hit back.

So I should adopt poor behavior because some other group did? There's sometimes a point to that for in person interactions with small groups but I don't see how that applies at larger scales. It becomes nothing more than an excuse for the poor behavior of your own in-group, which further exacerbates polarization for little to no benefit.

Realize that such behavior isn't going to change the mind of the opposition, and those in your group already agreed with you regardless. Then the bad behavior is a particularly harmful form of virtue signalling.

Self defense is not poor behavior. Responding to attack is not poor behavior. Submission is not good behavior.

On a larger scale, demanding that victims enable and accommodate their own bullies achieves exactly the same as in school yard. Bullies get stronger and dominant while victims get blamed for what bullies do.

That is why Canada is responding to tariffs. Whan goes on here is that republican enablers really want everyone else to just accept insults, lies and attacks passively and ineffectively. It feels good to them, because they are in group and harm to out group feels good.

How do you choose to defend yourself? What attack(s) do you percieve? What is your response to percieved attack?

The rest I pretty much agree with.

I don't disagree with what you literally wrote there but I don't feel like it's really a response to what I wrote. It seems to me that you are misconstruing the definition of self defense in order to justify poor behavior.

As far as I'm concerned, responding to immature behavior or misrepresentations or whatever with your own similarly poor behavior is not (at least in general) a form of self defense. It's just childish behavior.

If your argument amounts to "they behaved like a child so it's okay if I behave like a child" then I guess we just have fundamentally incompatible worldviews.

The much more important point that I was trying to make though is that, even if you feel 100% morally justified that doesn't make it an effective tactic. The behavior you described in your earlier comment serves only to further divide parties that already disagree while actively eroding social standards. It isn't just pointless behavior, it's actively harmful.

I mean, I kinda feel you can say the same thing about many left talking points. "Republicans are evil and thuggish cavemen" has been barely subtext for well over twenty years!

I don't have a source, but I half-remember that some initial study on Atrazine assumed that the frogs were turning gay because the researcher hadn't realized the behavioral sex change.

> How do you deal with that?

Historically, with a slap, either open handed or with a glove to induce a dual. But we live in more genial times where such egregious violence is deemed unavailable.

> I don't think the human political brain is built for this level of indirection.

Indeed. People using incompetent and mistaken assumptions doesn't improve on their desire to tear up the political foundations in the US.

It's still bullshit. For example, the last cited study ($3 million of their claimed $8 million) aimed to find out why asthma is so much more prevalent in women than men and learn more about gender-specific inflammatory mechanisms.

Being scientists, they saw an opportunity to study the contributions of estrogens to HDM-induced asthma outcomes. SHOCKING AND SCANDALOUS.

You're kinda splitting hairs here which lends me to believe you also fail to grasp the reality of the situation. We have no idea if Trump really knows the difference between the words transgenic and transgender, but we know that these studies are mostly--if not completely--focused on aspects other than simply changing the sex of the mice. If I had to guess, the grant proposals probably contained enough woke buzzwords to make them appear to be such.

source: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-tr...

I think we should be beyond giving the Trump regime the benefit of the doubt. They’ve shown repeated and obvious malicious intent. I think it’s more likely that they cherry picked this study because they believed that their rubes would fall for it. I doubt Trump himself knows anything about the study.

Splitting hairs? The original comment implied that studies on transgenic mice were becoming politically verboten, which is unambiguously false.

Only because it somewhat goes against one anti-Trump narrative do we now accuse the commentator of “splitting hairs”/being overfocused on details. Sorry, but details-obsession is part of Hacker News for you. Trump does more than enough idiotic things, I’ve never understood the desire to just make up things about him.

It makes zero sense to claim Trump was referring to transgenic mice because nobody cares about that, regardless of political affiliation.

He attempted a bit of misinformation, which characterizes most of his address. Certainly, his supporters interpreted it to mean transgender mice. IMO, this was deliberate. If it wasn’t deliberate, then Trump is just an idiot. If it was deliberate, then he’s purposefully spreading misinformation in pursuit of some culture war.

No matter how you cut it, it reflects very poorly on our president.

The way they complain about it though, it seems to me that they think mouse studies are done for the sake of mice. ‘Crazy woke liberals want to make even mice transgender.’ Is the whistle they’re blowing.

Our political discourse is especially stupid right now, and it is bi-partisan.

Drop the "both sides" falsehood.

So far, there there are multiple replies to my comment arguing with me about something I didn't say (i.e. "the cited studies don't have anything to do with making mice transgender"). So yes, both sides are so eager to score points that they don't even bother to read anymore.

It's bi-partisan in the way that a paper cut is bi-partisan to having your leg dissolved off with acid.

Really difficult to argue that “both sides are equally to blame for the bad discourse” when one side had a mob of terrorists storm the capitol (then pardoned all of them) and the other side held up tiny signs during a speech.

Or instead of making a bad faith comparison of partisan violence, you could compare it to the George Floyd protests which injured over 700 police officers and killed over 20 people.

And in which case did the party leader stand up and incite the mob before they went on their war path?

If we’re going to compare January 6 to the George Floyd riots, one was explicitly political, and the other one was fed up populace.

One started with a rally intended to gas the mob up in hopes of securing the capital for their fuhrer. The other was started as the result of the outright murder of an individual by a state actor.

One was essentially organized by the Republican Party leader, and the other was an impromptu display of discontent.

There were quite a few Democrats that encouraged the protests that turned into riots during the George Floyd stuff.

That's literally exactly the same as Trump. He encouraged a protest, but literally told them to peacefully protest, just as many of those Democrats did.

And for how many of them were the protests formed around the Democrat politician?

How many Democrats: got up on stage for a rally for themselves then -> told the attendees to go and “peacefully protest” then -> the protestors went and turned into a riot?

How many of the George Floyd protesters were chanting to hang a public official? With the intent of dismantling democracy?

These are not the same.

Now go one step further and discuss what both sides were protesting.

There was no evidence supporting the narrative for either riot. The idea that black people are disproportionately killed by police is not supported by the data, unless you think a single murder justified all of those riots and the deaths.

Why make up lies on the internet?

It's not a lie, you've been sold a lie about what the statistics mean. Police shootings are proportional to "encounters with violent criminals", regardless of race [2]. Black people are overrepresented in police shootings because they are overrepresented in the criminal population, eg. 49% of known murderers are black, despite comprising only 13% of the population [1], and other violent offenses track this disparity. There is simply no convincing evidence that a large percentage of shootings are racially motivated once controlling for violent encounters.

Some try to argue that black people are overrepresented in the criminal population because of over policing, but it simply does not follow that this would cause almost 50% of murderers to be black. It would require a lot of special pleading to explain the evidence, eg. ok, maybe most murderers are black but most other encounters with police are racially motivated, and/or police would have to be letting upwards of 10,000 white murderers go to reach demographic parity with black offenders. These epicycles are stupid, you need to let go of this left dogma that vehemently believes that all groups are necessarily the same and only oppression drives observable differences in outcomes. Whatever the ultimate source of the group differences, police action broadly following the distribution of criminality with no racial component is best supported by the facts (there are always individual exceptions of course).

Proper statistical arguments like this debunked claims that the 2020 election was rigged, so as I said, unless you think Floyd's murder by itself justified the protests and the riots and the ensuing death, injuries and destruction, then neither set of protests/riots were justified. But it's interesting that only one of these false narratives is amplified as true and is culturally taboo to question.

[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

[2] https://fryer.scholars.harvard.edu/publications/empirical-an...

Thank you for bringing the receipts! I really appreciate it when people spend some of their time to debunk political lies.

We can find against the crazy right by making even more extreme strawmen.

Not really worth fighting it on these issues in forums like HN anymore, they’re becoming reddit-ized and tribal. People will probably read your comment as an endorsement/defense of Trump rather than the factual clarification it is.

This comment thread is indeed pretty depressing.

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