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Comment by chuckadams | Hacker News Reader

These are the same people that zeroed out research funding on transgenic mice because they thought it was the same as transgendered.

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This has been repeated in several places, but it's not entirely accurate. Having looked through a partial list of the studies that were cancelled, many of them seemed to be looking at the effects of sex hormones (e.g. on memory or wound healing). These could involve transgenic mice that overexpress hormones or receptors, but also injection of exogenous hormones.

Still a ridiculous reason to defund medical research.

> partial list of the studies that were cancelled

https://airtable.com/appGKlSVeXniQZkFC/shrFxbl1YTqb3AyOO

Honestly, having seen the list, I reserve judgement.

That ended up not being the gotcha that y'all thought it was and CNN had to add a correction on their fact-check because mice were indeed being administered cross-sex hormone therapy, just not for the purpose of changing their sex. One of the experiments in particular was to determine how gender-affirming care would affect humans, which indeed makes it at odds with the administration's DEI policy and is not just them being dumb about what transgenic means.

> is not just them being dumb

That's a wild take for anything this admin does.

I read the papers posted by the White House to support their claim of transgendered mice . https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/03/yes-biden-spent-...

I’m not a molecular biologist, but some seemed just good solid research on women’s health, like asthma prevalence, that just happened to study a mixture of transgender individuals and mice models since both are useful for understanding androgen sensitivity. Another included research on disruptors in lutenizing hormone. It still seemed a pretty dumb thing to attack.

Not to mention transgendered people are people too, and allowed to have some medical research related to their existence.

And that’s on the official White House page? The language is crazy in that post.

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