Trump has cut funding for transgender mice. The only problem? The mice aren’t transgender.
Trump’s illiteracy reaches new heights
What a world we live in.
It sounds like a satire piece, or perhaps a headline for some alternate universe where Stuart Little was a documentary.
Sadly, it’s not. It’s a stunning indictment that the leader of the free world either can’t, or doesn’t, read.
Yesterday in Congress, Donald Trump announced a range of alarming things in his State of the Union address, including tax relief for the rich disguised as cuts on tips and overtime, and more sanctions on China to continue his ill-advised trade war. But the most alarming of all was a revelation that reminded us of something we already knew.
Trump is borderline illiterate.
Trump doesn’t read his news or policy analytics or commentary. He takes it from Fox, which is why a former Fox host is now in charge of the defence of the US.
Trump also doesn’t read his memos; after his last administration, it was revealed that aides struggled to get Trump to take in information provided verbally to him in anything longer than a few sentences, and found he struggled to read to briefings — a lot of his first term was about people learning to work around the fact that Trump doesn’t like to do work.
That’s probably why confidential government files have again been moved to Mar-a-Lago. He’s gotta be able to golf while pretending to be President on Musk’s behalf.
But his new term has revealed new extraordinary depths to Trump’s ignorance. Not only does he think no one has heard of Lesotho (a country he mispronounced in a way that implies he’s never seen the word written down), he seems unaware that it is of importance because it’s located within South Africa — and that Musk has been meeting with the Prime Minister of it in attempts to do business with them.
Trump also seems incredibly confused over what exactly he is trying to bargain away from Ukraine, describing repeatedly his deals being for “raw earth minerals” — a mishearing of what the US is actually negotiating for: rare earth minerals.
But the fact that all his information is inputted verbally, and not via the written word, has been confirmed with an error that makes it clear that he is not reading any of this information. It has also been the cause of Trump’s announcement that $2.5 million dollars of spending was being cut on fertility studies on “transgender mice”.
If “transgender mice” seem like a figment of a transphobe’s imagination, it’s only because they are.
The fertility studies in question were being performed on transgenic mice. This refers to mice who have had a human gene transplanted into their sequence to make them suitable for our experimentation — the ability to do this (as well as other benefits of our genetic similarities) is why we use mice for research at all. The mice are not transgender, and this research has nothing to do with transgender people or medicine.
I repeat: the study is NOT about transgender fertility. At all. Just regular fertility.
The White House has tried to cover this up with a release claiming that actually the Biden administration has spent millions funding transgender medical research on mice. Which is true. But that was not the millions in funding that Trump was fearmongeringly referring to.
This makes one ask, how could Trump get this so wrong? How could he misread the word “transgenic” so badly?
The available evidence makes us conclude: he didn’t.
He didn’t read it. He only heard it, and his warped and wrong conservative view of the world made him misinterpret it — grossly.
This is funny and not funny. It’s funny because Trump is obviously an idiot, and this only draws attention to Trudeau’s blatant lies told for flattery that Trump is a “smart guy” making a “dumb move” by putting tariffs on Canada.
It’s also really not funny because this is the president of the US, a president whose lack of reading comprehension (or general ability) and critical thinking skills has shaped him into a tool for Russia. Right now he is undermining the entire Western military effort in the Ukraine because of this particular weakness of his for inputting information.
It’s also extremely unfunny for another reason.
This is a public display of what is going on in the minds of every anti-Trump supporter, and every anti-trans campaigner. They have intaken a warped view of the world, a perspective so unhinged and untied to reality that in it, unrealistic things can and do happen, regularly. The world, to their minds, is run on these insane ideas that are complete misunderstandings — deliberately created misunderstandings, and deliberately disseminated for the benefit of people like Trump.
Trump is a president whose has campaigned on the inappropriateness of “diversity” funding and funding for trans medicine, even though he is obviously totally unaware of the actual science and funding that goes into it, as well as its purpose and effects.
He is also the head of a movement that stands against trans medicine full stop; his neofascist ideology presents trans medicine as “dangerous”, and that the left have been brainwashed by their woke ideals, and actually hormones are very harmful to trans people, who are being inducted into this evil lifestyle by the woke agenda, and all the science supporting gender affirming care is being manipulated by doctors and researchers (who are probably just in this for the money) to show it’s much safer and more beneficial than it actually is.
This is the gist of the message that speakers spend hours delivering to enraptured audiences, and that is pushed via memes and in-jokes on social media such as reddit and facebook, and that news platforms like Fox News and New Zealand’s own The Platform rely on to generate the outrage that then supports their other claims that DEI or diversity initiatives are dangerous “woke pandering”.
But the people pushing it actually don’t understand anything about trans healthcare. If they did, they would be able to see a headline like this and realise that actually, the concept of trans fertility is so far in the future it would make no sense for this research to exist. Right now, our focus is on surgical genetalia transplants — and already these developments have allowed the first full penile transfers to occur on cis men. One of the leading gender confirmation surgeons reckons that we might have access to full genital transplants for trans people in as little as ten years.
And note that, like with all developments in transgender medicine, it is not just trans people benefitting. It’s not even transgender people benefitting in the first incidence — it’s cis men who’ve accidentally had their dicks cut off!
Cis women too have benefitted hugely from developments like oestrogen treatment in the past, regularly used to delay menopause or to block androgens in women with PCOS — a condition that affects up to a third of all cis women. Similarly, mastectomies and breast reconstruction surgery is performed more often on cisgender women than on trans people. Training surgeons in these surgeries and developing these treatments is something that benefits all of us — as is so often the case with science and medicine.
We are playing with building blocks, and it is impossible to create our tall towers without first laying sound foundations. Sometimes that means exploring medicines and treatments for things that you don’t personally believe are important or beneficial. But all modern hormone treatment owes its origins to the Berlin Institute for Sexual Science, which was destroyed by Nazis for its “ideology” of researching homosexuality and transgenderism.
Before it was shut in 1933, it helped many people and pioneered the global field of sexuality studies that would later lead to the western decriminalisation of homosexuality. But it was especially radical of its acceptance and study of transgender people, including non-binary people (described at the time as people who didn’t identify with a fixed or specific gender).
The institute was created after its founding doctor was left papers on sexuality and gender by a homosexual soldier who shot himself rather than face his own wedding. Today’s anti-trans ideology is being pushed largely, I suspect, by the same people who created the need for the “It Gets Better” campaign in the 2010s.
Anti-gay bullying and sentiments had turned suicides of queer youths into a social contagion, and the movement aimed to reach out to suicidal queer youth facing stigma because of their sexuality, particularly bullying, and let them know that being stuck in highschool surrounded by all the people bullying them isn’t forever, and that once you get out of highschool, your life has a chance to improve. It Gets Better was an attempt to address this, by telling the victims of bigoted bullying to “wait it out”. Much of this came in the form of youtube confessionals for other queer kids — but not all.
This is the sort of content that was produced for the cause. It’s jam-packed with slurs because the queer community has a long history of reclamation, and the aim was to “take the sting” out of these words. It’s been somewhat successful, as now these slurs have been partly m reclaimed, although this is also because corporate queer-washing still can’t get away with using the word “faggot” in advertising, so these terms have become language that now reflects “genuine community” and not the companies that want to make money off the now-very-popular queer positivity movement.
If the song feels shocking and not appropriate for children in 2025, remember that this was addressed at kids in schools who were the targets of these words — as actual slurs.
A number of the youths who themselves made It Gets Better videos of encouragement for other children would later kill themselves.
There is a hundred years between 1919, when the Insititute for Sexual Scince opened, and now. Society has changed — but only a little. Queer people are still killing themselves rather than having to face living life as a queer person in a straight, cis-centric society. Even though homosexuality is legalised and more accepted now, churches and cults still teach it is a sin and we must shun open “practitioners”. Nazis are still trying to sabotage the field of medicine for daring to treat trans people.
And they are still doing so because an ignorant little man monologuing at them from a press pulpit told them it was the right thing to do.
This is so ridiculous it would be comedic if the effects weren’t so real. Something straight out of Yes Minister.
How this plays out over the next few months is almost already defined; Trump will declare an National Emergency and claim special power, he will postpone any election, cancel the rule of law, and combine the police with the armed forces under his exclusive control. He will them claim to be President for life, as America aligns more with Russia as a combined dominant world power. It is only ordinary people who can take action with civil non-violent action - there is no-one else and the people outnumber the fascist government dictatorship forces.
Only ordinary people can stop this slide into America becoming a Right Wing dictatorship.
Forget that trump is an idiot, cant read etc, that time has past - it has become an irrelevant argument - we are well past any legal argument or ethical considerations, it has become Right Wing domination completely for the Self Interest band wagon!
I hope not for the sake of all of us, but I have much concern we are so close already!