Transgenic vs transgender

Politics & Elections
1

As you probably are aware, in his address to Congress the other day, Trump railed against “transgender” mice being a part of governmentally funded experiments, when it was actually work being done on transgenic mice. He’s an illiterate moron, for sure, but my question is

Did he know that he was confusing two entirely separate terms, but didn’t care (or , more precisely, actively enjoyed riling up his base over nonsense)?
Or
Did he not understand that “transgenic” and “transgender” are two different things?

Apart from this, you might comment on whether he prepared this section (or any other section) of the speech himself, and therefore whether the terms were being deliberately confused by his speechwriters, who did understand the difference, for him to deliver without understanding either concept. But mainly I’m interested in knowing whether you think of him primarily as ignorant or malicious. He’s both, of course, but here’s a chance for you to delineate the two. Either he knows the difference between “transgenic” and “transgender” or he didn’t. Is this a mark of his stupidity or of his manipulation of his MAGA base?

  • Is he more dumb
  • Is he more manipulative?
0 voters
2

OK, fixed the poll.

3

The thing is, he didn’t hear about this and put it into his speech on his own. Someone on his staff saw that line item and mis-read it OR purposefully decided to say “Fuck it, it’s close enough to rile up the rubes.”

I think he’s stupid enough to not fact check it, but even more cunning enough to know that this fits his narrative regardless of it’s truthfulness. He doesn’t care about truth or being right, he just cares about peddling bullshit. I voted manipulative.

Eta: he’s smart enough to know what will piss people off and get them on his side-- shit like “transgender mice.” That’s manipulative behavior regardless of his lack of smarts.

4

Trans mice, condoms for (no, not that) Gaza and the list could go on forever.

The correct answer is both.

5

Whoever wrote that speech knew it was a button pusher, and that no amount of after-the-fact correcting would unpush that button.

6

And it keeps the intelligent people fact-correcting about bullshit instead of focusing whole-heartedly on the actual harm he’s inflicting on the world.

Total sly manipulator. This wasn’t stupidity on his part. This one sentence enrages both sides of the aisle, but for different reasons, and so: mission accomplished.

7

“The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.”

8

And now Moore’s Law has applied itself to Brandolini’s Law. The amount of bullshit created per energy is now doubling every 18 months, while the cost of refutation is the same as ever.

9

In a sense it’s irrelevant. The point is to own the libs and show anti-woke credentials.

Is just like the immigrants eating cats and dogs, and litter boxes in schools. The truth isn’t the point.

10

What Trump keeps proving is what I keep saying:

It really isn’t their friends, their neighbors, their colleagues, or the Democrats who are looking down on Trump supporters, laughing at them behind their backs, and calling them stupid.

It’s the places where they get their news and the people to whom they keep writing checks.

11

Remember, when Clinton said that half of Trump supporters were deplorable, they got offended because it wasn’t all of them.

12

“They’re eating the transgender mice!!!”

13

That’s how acceptance works. Small bites.

14

I find it impossible to vote in the poll because Trump is absolutely both dumb and malicious and the two are impossible to untangle.

Is Trump dumb? As a brick. This is the guy who thought injecting bleach might be a cure for COVID, and who thinks Ukraine has valuable reserves of “raw earth”. Is he manipulative? This is the guy who lies constantly, a congenital habitual liar who not only thinks nothing of lying, but thinks nothing of blatantly contradicting himself. The only “truth” in his world is whatever bullshit he blurts out in any given moment.

The bizarre reference to “transgender mice” is based on a simple premise: there was some research that was funded by the Biden administration, and this automatically makes it very very bad. The fact that the research had something to do with “trans”-something makes it 10 times worse. That’s all he needs to know, and that’s all that his sycophants need to know.

Like most of the things Trump says and does, the infuriating thing about this mix of ignorance and malice is that it’s dangerous. Genetically engineered mice are a very important research tool for studying human disease and the efficacy of medications, and is especially important in cancer research. Trump’s ignorance and malice is a direct threat to scientific progress in general and medical research in particular, and defunding research based on comically incorrect misconceptions is going to have a direct negative impact on human health.

15

Tell Trump that dentists are teaching children to masticate and he’ll put it in a speech.

16

The Whitehouse has clarified which research the speech was referring to. A couple of them appear to have the transgender/transgenic confusion, but most of them are actual research using mouse models on the effects of XYZ on animals who have undergone some sort of transgender treatment.

Obviously those who think transgender treatments are good and effective medicine will not think that shutting down these projects is good, because they would probably increase the safety and efficacy of gender treatments. But Trump was speaking to people who mostly don’t think that.

17

I was aware that some of this research was using transgenic (meaning “genetically modified”) mice to evaluate the safety and efficacy of certain hormones, some of which may be beneficial to some transgender individuals. That is not, however, what Trump said.

And in fact the White House statement itself is much of the same bullshit that Trump himself doled out. Like:

Last night, President Donald J. Trump highlighted many of the egregious examples of waste, fraud, and abuse funded by American taxpayers, including $8 million spent by the Biden Administration for making mice transgender.”

Followed by this astounding “explanation” that made me double-check that this was really coming from an official White House source (it was!):

The Fake News losers at CNN immediately tried to fact check it, but President Trump was right (as usual).

It’s incredible but true – the traditionally dignified statements from the White House have now been reduced to the taunts of third-graders at recess, reflecting the mentality of its current occupant.

Then followed by this bullshit:

FACT: Under the Biden Administration, the National Institutes of Health doled out millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded grants for institutions across the country to perform transgender experiments on mice.

Well, no, the all-caps “FACT” here needs to be replaced by the word “LIE”. These were not “transgender experiments on mice”, nor were they “experiments on transgender mice” :grin: They were just selected example of ongoing evaluations of different pharmaceutical therapies, hormone therapies in particular, that have potentially important applications in many different medical circumstances. Some may (or may not) play a useful role as a component of transgender therapy.

Again, the use of transgenic mice is a vitally important part of a great deal of research across the board into human disease and medication efficacy. To call this medical research “waste” is dangerously irresponsible and typical of the mindset of these troglodytes.

18

The largest single item on that list:

“Gonadal hormones as mediators of sex and gender influences in asthma”

  • “We will study the contributions of estrogens to HDM-induced asthma outcomes using male and female gonadectomized mice treated with estradiol…”

So they’re cutting off the gonads of both male and female mice, and giving them female hormones.

At that point, “transgender mice” is a pretty good description of the male mice in the study.

Of course, that’s not what the study actually does, it’s the setup for the study. But then my previous comment applies - it’s “what will happen if we do this thing…” that the incoming administration and their voters don’t think you should be doing.

19

What can be hard to grasp about Trump is that he doesn’t care at all whether what he says is true. It doesn’t matter to him whether the mice are transgenic or transgender, or even what the difference is between the two. Complaining about transgender mice gets his supporters in a lather, and pisses off his opponents.

When Donald Trump speaks, he’s not telling you what he believes. He’s telling you what he wants you to believe.

That doesn’t mean he isn’t an illiterate moron. He is. But he’s really good at getting attention for himself and sending signals to his supporters.

20

“It has come to my attention that the Catholic Church supports transubstantiation. Of all organizations, the Catholic Church? Who would have believed that? Nobody would have believed that. From now on, the Catholic Church will not practice transubstantiation, and I will sign an Executive Order banning it on Monday.”

Sarcasm and fiction off, but the way this administration is going these days, it’s entirely within the realm of possibility.