The news does get stranger by the day. Yes, this is a real thing. Trump did talk about transgender mice at his joint session of Congress, faux SOTU meeting on March 4. But if you did think that the transgender mice was something out of Andy Borowitz, you’ll be glad to know he did give it his best treatment.
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In one of the more ominous moments from his speech to Congress on Tuesday night, Donald J. Trump blamed a surge in transgender mice on “Haitians eating all the cats.”
“For four years, mice swarmed over the border, looking for sex-change operations that Sleepy Joe Biden would pay for,” he alleged. “These mice had nothing to fear because they knew that all the cats had been eaten.”
Vowing to usher in what he called a “golden age for cats,” he vowed to use billions in tariff revenue to establish a Strategic Cat Reserve.
Trump spent the rest of his speech listing his second-term accomplishments, boasting, “I have already caused more damage than all other presidents put together.”
Listen, I think Borowitz should become one of Trump’s speechwriters. The longer Trump stays in politics, the more he tends towards what Borowitz used to call Not The News, back when there was a difference between news, politics, and batshit parody. Not like now. But the real story of the transgender mice comes from Mother Jones.
“Eight million dollars for making mice transgender. This is real,” Donald Trump said in his first joint address to Congress on Tuesday, leading to an onslaught of online mockery. So the administration issued a release—titled “Yes, Biden Spent Millions on Transgender Animal Experiments”—to prove how right the commander-in-chief was. (Their other press release on Trump’s speech, “President Trump’s Historic Address Captivates America,” was roughly as accurate.)
Calling out the “Fake News losers at CNN” who “immediately tried to fact-check it,” the White House wrote:
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.
It listed six NIH–funded experiments that involved mice and gender-related keywords, seemingly drawn in part from outspoken anti-trans House Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.)’s February testimony on “taxpayer-funded animal cruelty.”
Nancy Mace is the kind of congresswoman that Andy Borowitz pulled out of his grey matter years ago. Now she’s real. She and Marge and Bobo, they’re all real, they are elected members of Congress, riding Trump’s MAGA coattails. People that are so wild that only the mind of an Andy Borowitz or a Kurt Vonnegut could have conceived them, are now flesh and blood and running the government.
The results of the transgender mouse studies that so upset the White House? The skeletal maturation study showed that gender-affirming care preserves or improves bone formation. The fertility study showed that, while the number of eggs produced by trans men decreased, their quality did not. The one on cancer showed that trans men have a reduced risk of breast cancer after undergoing HRT—a useful finding for cisgender patients as well, researchers note.
The far right would be all for this research—if it proved their point. I mean, imagine the Daily Wire if any one of these studies had led to mass mouse death.
Notably, one of the studies listed in the White House document isn’t even about transgender health care. It asks how asthma affects regular ol’ men and women differently. (It had the word “sex hormones” in it, so it’s fair that they found it confusing.)
It’s a common talking point on the right to bring up animals in the same breath as trans people (litter box panics, Elon Baby Mom Four’s children’s book Elephants Are Not Birds). But I’m not sure they want to go down that rabbit hole. Then I’ll start talking about sex-changing clownfish. No one wants thAT.
It’s all a hoot but never forget: the culture war madness is put out there to distract you. Trump doesn’t want you focusing on the crashing stock market, the trade wars with our allies, or the backstabbing of our other ally at war, Ukraine. So definitely, let’s pick on the transgenders. There are a total of seven professional transgender athletes (if I heard correctly in Ron Filipkowski’s latest podcast) but let’s publish column inch after column inch of outrage about them. And the mice.
Just remember, each distraction masks something awful that this administration is doing. That’s its purpose. The yous and mes know that, but MAGA believes all this is real, just like Donald tells him it is.
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It’s not even that.
These people are so, so stupid, they saw a report about experiments with TRANSGENIC mice, in which mice are evolved that have other animals genes inserted to check how those genes function when separated from their natural environment. These genes may include human genes, (as in transgenic pigs, which can have organs ‘human enough’ to be transplanted into us.) The last transgenic mice in the news are the mice with ‘mammoth genes’ to see if extra hair growth could be inserted into mammals in preparation to see if elephants can be ‘altered’ into mammoths and thus rebirth an extinct species.
However their tiny brains saw the ‘trans’ part of the word and rushed to complete what I can only assume, was an image of cross-dressing mice.
Then the rest of their tiny minds ran with it into their mouths to seemingly prove, beyond any lingering, remaining, tiny doubt how ignorant, moronic, and badly educated they are. And included the ‘new fact’ into an actual presidential address to congress and the nation cementing their sheer stupidity into the official record for the annals of all time.
And these people think they are taking over the country?
Luckily their opposition, us, is not as thick as they are.