On "transgender" mice:
1. First, animals do not have human concepts of gender. It is important that we be as precise as possible with our terminology here. Words do have meaning. Mice certainly have sexual characteristics at the level of genitalia etc. But gender is a psycho-social construct that assigns certain roles, behaviours, dress etc.
2. The mice that the poster child for advanced neurosyphilis was ranting about are transgenic.
3. Transgenic mice are lab strains that have their genomes altered to study the function of specific proteins or genes or even cell types. Some examples:
3.1. Humanised (NSG and similar) mice: these guys lack T, B and NK cells i.e. a functional immune system since 2 genes critical to immune system development are lost. Thus, you can engraft a human immune system in them and thus study human cancers, human pathogens, implant them with patient tumours etc. I've done this work. Several colleagues of mine have used far more advanced humanised mouse models to ask such fundamental questions.
3.2. The Cre-Lox system: I first encountered these in my postdoc and they are wondrous. Here, certain enzymes may be used to make very precise deletions within genes. The Cre-Lox system is an excellent way to generate conditional knockouts i.e. the gene in question is only removed when specific conditions are met e.g. at a given developmental stage or if the mouse's food is supplemented with doxycycline. This allows you to avoid any genetic manipulations which are lethal at the embryonic stage. It's powerful stuff. In fact, in my postdoc lab, this system was used to delete a specific gene in a specific B cell subset only, and they published a truly beautiful paper accounting for how that gene product/B cell subset impacts obesity-associated metabolic disorder.
4. If you look at the highly cringe page on the whitehouse dot gov website, the projects the "transgender" mice they have mentioned are predominantly asking questions about the roles of androgens on asthma pathogenesis, microbiome composition, and breast cancer risk. The mice did not "transition" in any way.
These projects would certainly highlight how hormonal differences between men and women impact disease/immune processes and also provide guidance for medical care for transgender individuals. Going after these projects is sloppy Ctrl+F DOGE work coupled to the GOP simply seeing trans folk as subhuman, worthy of neither dignity nor healthcare.
4.1. I call the page highly cringe because even the diaries from my teen years didn't reek of this degree of insecurity:
