You realize a lot of hormones could be classified as gender-affirming, right?
Testosterone therapy would be gender-affirming for most men. Huge numbers of women take progesterone. Many, many others hormones reinforce gender-associated behaviours and physiology. No one thinks anything of it until someone is taking it for reasons they don’t approve of.
But we could manipulate all kinds of studies we don’t agree with because they happen to utilize “gender-affirming” hormones. We could do this to tens of thousands of studies. We would be technically correct, yet extremely wrong.
In this case the main point of the study is laid out here: "information on the effects of sex hormone therapy on immune responsiveness is scarce"
If you ignore the reason this gap in knowledge became relevant, this has nothing to do with transgender people or affirming gender. It has everything to do with understanding the health of the broader population; particularly as sex hormones are used with increasing frequency (sex hormones are androgens, estrogens, and progestogens; very common, normal hormones used by all kinds of people).
Yes this kind of therapy is very important for some people to live a life where their hormones align with their sex. I have a friend who is a cis woman but has enough testosterone being naturally produced that she has some thicker facial hair. And this is with hormone therapy. If she wasn't taking supplementary female hormones, she'd likely have more serious misalignment between primary and secondary sex characteristics. And I have to imagine it could cause problems with her monthly cycle if the hormones aren't balanced right
but they are not searching for a way to make mice transgender. The point of the research is to model those effects as they might occur in humans, not to figure out how to make transgender mice.
Please read for yourself, you're showing ignorance and laziness, which leads us all to believe you're not arguing in good faith. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
The effects mentioned in the abstract are:
- How feminizing hormone therapy (estrogen and anti-testosterone medications) affects immune responses to HIV vaccines
- Changes in gene expression patterns in immune cells following hormone therapy
- Potential differences in vaccine efficacy and adverse outcomes related to hormone therapy
Why is this important? This research could lead to the ability to create more personalized vaccination approaches that consider hormonal factors between men and women.