> There really was a series of government-funded studies concerning gender in mice this is true...in the sense that if you make a list of government-funded stu

> There really was a series of government-funded studies concerning gender in mice this is true...in the sense that if you make a list of government-funded studies, and ctrl-F it for "gender", and then ctrl-F that list for "mice", you get a non-zero number of results. of the $8 million they're claiming, $3.1 million went to “Gonadal hormones as mediators of sex and gender influences in asthma” so...they're studying asthma. using mice. who are given hormones. this is pretty far from the "they're making mice transgender" talking point. if you read the abstract that they link to [0]: > Starting around puberty and peaking during mid-life, women have increased asthma prevalence and higher rates of asthma exacerbations than men. Causes of these disparities remain unclear; however, studies have shown that sex-specific inflammatory mechanisms controlled by hormones contribute to differences in airway reactivity in response to environmental stimuli. Despite this, experimental models of asthma have not explored the contributions of sex hormones to inflammatory mechanisms in the female and male lung asthma affects men and women differently, and they want to figure out why. specifically, they're trying to isolate the affects of hormones on lung tissue. that seems like a worthwhile subject to me? a simplistic understanding of biology would be that lungs are lungs, and the same between men and women. refining that understanding seems like a good goal for basic research to pursue. if you continue reading the abstract, oh my god they mention that trans people exist > and no studies have explored the effects of feminizing hormone therapy with estrogen in the lungs of trans women but...this just seems to me like the scientific method? they're trying to eliminate as many uncontrolled variables as they can: > In Aim 2, we will study the contributions of estrogens to HDM-induced asthma outcomes using male and female gonadectomized mice treated with estradiol if you want to study the effects of sex-specific hormones, it seems logical that you would neuter them first, so that they're not producing any hormones of their own, they're only receiving the ones that you inject them with. so you have female mice, with ovaries removed, who are receiving replacement female hormones. and male mice, with testes removed, who are also receiving female hormones. if you want to call that "transgender mice", sure, knock yourself out. what I see is just a scientific experiment where they're tried to eliminate as many uncontrolled variables as possible. now, why are they only doing it with female hormones (estradiol)? why aren't they doing the opposite experiment where the male and female gonadectomized mice are given testosterone? I don't know for certain, but the most likely explanation is that testosterone is a controlled substance in the US (due to its use by weightlifting bros), and so doing experiments with it would be more difficult because of the increased legal requirements. 0: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10891526 https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10891526