The National Institutes of Health, under President Joe Biden, has spent millions of dollars funding experiments where animals are given sex-change procedures and studied for the benefit of the transgender community.
Taxpayers have footed the bill for roughly $10 million in transgender animal experiments in recent years, according to a selection of grants compiled by the White Coat Waste Project and obtained exclusively by the Washington Examiner. The federal spending supported research ranging from studying the cardiovascular effect of giving "feminizing hormone therapy" to male rats to providing animals injected with sex hormones, a "popular drug of abuse utilized at raves," to investigate overdose in "vulnerable female and transgender populations."
"Taxpayers don't want their hard-earned money wasted by the NIH to make monkeys and mice transgender through invasive surgeries and hormone therapies or to give animals overdoses of sex party drugs," Anthony Bellotti, president and founder of White Coat Waste Project, told the Washington Examiner. "This is low-hanging fruit for DOGE and the incoming Administration that we're proud to have uncovered and exposed. The solution is simple: Stop the money. Stop the madness."
Elon Musk, who President-elect Donald Trump has tasked with cutting government costs and improving outputs through the Department of Government Efficiency, has signaled openness to cutting federally funded animal testing. Musk's medical device company, Neuralink, however, faced a federal investigation in late 2022 following complaints from employees that its animal testing was causing unnecessary suffering and death among monkeys at his labs.
One of the most expensive publicly-funded transgender animal studies seeks to understand "the effects of feminizing hormone therapy with estrogen in the lungs of trans women" by giving mice female sex hormones and then irritating their respiratory systems with mites to record information about their reactions. To date, the study has cost roughly $3.1 million, according to federal records. A similarly expensive grant, costing the public about $2.6 million since its inception, funded research where female mice were given male sex hormones and then monitored for changes in fertility. The mice suffered "defects in ovarian architecture," according to federal records.
"Of course, the Biden-Harris administration wasted millions of tax dollars on DEI grants to create transgender lab mice," Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) told the Washington Examiner. "DOGE should tackle this woke animal testing on Day 1."
Some of the publicly funded studies involved testing how transgender sex hormones affected animals after they were harmed. Research at Brigham and Women's Hospital that has cost the public $442,444, for instance, looked at how sex hormones altered the healing of wounds in "large animals." NIH funded a second study researching the effect of cross-sex hormones on wound healing in mice. Another lab, funded by about $1.2 million in public grants, saw animals injected with testosterone to test if they have an increased risk of overdose when exposed to a party drug popular with transgender people.
While it is common scientific practice to use animals as models for people to test the effects of different medical interventions, organizations such as the White Coat Waste Project have long opposed taxpayer funding for such studies. The organization has characterized the studies as abusive and aims to "retire survivors [of animal testing] as pets."
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Other publicly funded research on transgender animals included injecting female mice with testosterone to investigate how hormone replacement therapy affects the development of breast cancer, testing an HIV vaccine on mice exposed to cross-sex hormones, and monitoring how "gender-affirming hormone therapy" affects the gut health of rodents.
"Egregious government waste like tax-funded transgender animal tests is Exhibit A for why we need spending bills that Congress can actually read, debate, and defend to the American people," Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) said in a statement to the Washington Examiner.
In addition to funding research that saw animals subjected to sex-change treatments, the federal government also funded studies arguing for the importance of such experiments.
"We believe that animal models of [Gender-Affirming Hormone Therapy] can help fill this gap by allowing researchers to conduct studies not possible in humans to better understand the specific biological systems affected by GAHT," says one publicly funded paper. A study funded by the same grant argued that mice could be used as a "model" for "peripubertal transmasculine youth."
Transgender research funded by the NIH recently came under fire from lawmakers, with six Republican senators demanding answers from the agency in early December after a researcher working on a taxpayer-funded study on transgender children opted to withhold its results.
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"The NIH has taken the cheese and fell victim to the DEI trap," Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) told the Washington Examiner. "While I've spent years fighting for more research and expanding treatment options for those with metastatic breast cancer, the leading 'health' agency in Washington has been mousing around and spending millions on rodent sex changes. These silly science projects will be DOA in the DOGE era."
NIH did not respond to the Washington Examiner's request for comment.
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