Trump doubles down on ridiculous 'transgender mice' claim in Musk's final press conference

It’s no secret US president Donald Trump is against trans rights, having signed an executive order on the day of his inauguration “defending women from gender ideology extremism” and, more recently, taking to his Truth Social platform to rant about trans athletes – but Friday (May 30) saw the Potus make the same mistake about a study involving “transgender mice” which he has made before.

Back in March, addressing a joint session of Congress, Trump attacked Joe Biden’s administration by claiming it had spent $8 million dollars to make “mice transgender”.

There was just one problem: the study in question concerns transgenic mice – that is, per the National Human Genome Research Institute, “an organism or cell whose genome has been altered by the introduction of one or more foreign DNA sequences from another species by artificial means”.

The White House even doubled down on Trump’s comments following a fact-check from “the Fake News losers at CNN”, claiming under Biden’s administration, the National Institutes of Health “doled out millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded grants for institutions across the country to perform transgender experiments in mice”.

They also listed a number of studies which they considered to meet this description.

However, CNN’s fact-check noted: “The White House list made clear what Trump, in the speech, did not: the studies were meant to figure out how these treatments might affect the health of humans who take them, not for the purpose of making mice transgender.”

Now, in a farewell press conference for Doge boss Elon Musk on Friday, Trump listed a number of things cancelled by the Department of Government Efficiency.

“$8 million for making mice transgender. So they [the Biden administration] spent $8 million on making mice transgender,” he said.

Over on social media, CNN medical analyst Jonathan Reiner was on hand to point out the difference to Trump:

Another noted this isn’t the first time he’s been corrected on this issue:

“Somebody please explain ‘transgenic mice’ research to Grandpa,” begged a third:

And congressman Robert Garcia decided to respond with a GIF of a stunned Kamala Harris:

Trump isn’t the only Republican to fail to recognise the difference between ‘transgender’ and ‘transgenic’, with talk show host Bill Maher previously correcting conservative commentator Charlie Kirk when he made a similar ‘transgender mice’ claim.

Maher interjected: “I called that out on my own show, that was bulls***. It wasn’t transgender. That worries me about you, Charlie, you seemed to have swallowed that one whole, like a snake does a mouse, without looking into it. It was transgenic mice.

“It wasn’t transgender; it was transgenic. They were studying mice for health reasons.”

Kirk conceded: “I stand corrected on that.”

We can’t help but wonder at this point if ‘transgender mice’ are the next ‘gay frogs’...

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