On the “transgender mice” debacle, the democrats are not helping themselves. Listening to Pod Save America this week, they made jokes about it in reference to women’s sports and later one of the presenters appeared to be defending the idea of a trans-mice research project.
There were two references to it in the episode (AI transcript so forgive any errors):
First reference:
“8 million dollars for making mice transgender. 10 million dollars for male circumcision in Mozambique. 20 million dollars for the Arab Sesame Street in the Middle East.
8 million to make mice transgender and 8 million to turn them back. And some of those mice, by the way, what's so fucking terrible is that some of those trans mice then like kind of defeated a bunch of other mice in all these mazes. And it's like, is that fair to have trans mice competing against cisgender mice in a maze?
What I know is nice is that he brought one of those trans mice to the State Of the Union and it was sitting right next to Melania.
Yeah, made him head of the park service.”
Second reference:
“It's also, look, again, it's like, defending these programs is always a trap. And it's like, fine, we live in a world where defending really good things is a trap. But a lot of science sounds ridiculous until it makes the world a much better place.
You could probably go back and describe research into stealth airplanes. It's like they're trying to make invisible airplanes. So you can come up with-
You're for the mice. Yeah, yeah.
Well, I'm for a process of assigning grants that allow you to do medical research in all kinds of ways. We study all kinds of things in mice before we study them in people. And like, of course, of course.”
Now I get his point about the need for scientific research that leads to additional discoveries, but where’s the common sense to question whether the idea of transgender mice are actually a thing first and foremost?