[tonnydourado]

The studies weren't about gender in mice because, gender being a social construct, mice don't have it.

*Some* of the studies were about the potential physiological effects of hormone therapy. They used mice, but the point was to study how humans are affected by HRT.

The way the article is written makes it sound like they're putting mice in drag and asking them their pronouns.

[s1artibartfast]

Not a Trump fan, but for many people including me, Trump comes out looking like the sane one when he calls a mouse on HRT a trans mouse, and the rebuttals are:

-"The studies weren't about gender in mice because, gender being a social construct, mice don't have it"

-Scientists weren't actually "putting mice in drag and asking them their pronouns."

-Trump confused transgenic mice with transgender mice

[aredox]

Except that Trump is visibly insane in almost everyone of his interactions; and if we focus on the narrow topic of those mouse studies, their goal was to find ill effects of HRT - so scientists were literally looking for bad things HRT could cause.

[ipaddr]

The last line makes you both seem foolish because he is confusing both terms.

It reminds me of historical elections where one candidate called the other homo sapiens and the ignorance of the public fell for it

[s1artibartfast]

How so? From my point of view it seems like the conflation lies with the critics.

The word he used was transgender, and the studies were all for transgender health in a mouse model.

Critics are the ones bringing transgenic into the conversation, which neither matches what he said, or the majority of the studies.

It is as if Bob called the ocean blue, but Sally claims Bob really meant red, while simultaneously pointing out he is wrong because the ocean actually blue. It is a really weak criticism.

A more coherent response is simply: "Studying transgender health in mouse models is important, and those studies were a good use of money"

[CamperBob2]

gender being a social construct, mice don't have it.

You have to be careful there. Plenty of individual animals in the wild exhibit social behaviors that we would associate with unconventional gender roles if they were humans. There are known evolution-based rationales for many if not most of these behaviors, and it's safe to say there are unknown evolution-based rationales for the rest.

We're not special.

[krapp]

Homosexuality is not transgenderism. A homosexual man can still identify as a man and be attracted to men. Being attracted to a man doesn't make them equivalent to a transwoman.

Also conventional gender roles change over time, and vary by culture, because gender is performance. It used to be conventional for men to wear high heels and makeup and kiss each other on the mouth, and sexual relationships between men weren't always considered transgressive of masculine norms.

[CamperBob2]

Yep, all very true.

I spent most of my childhood believing that homosexuality was unnatural, inherently sinful, and entirely unique to humans, because that's the spiel that the local Southern Baptist preachers were selling. The same is true for things we call "gender roles." Some male animals act in ways we once reflexively associated with females of their species, and vice versa.

I'll edit the comment to remove the reference to homosexuality, though, because that point wasn't especially clear or useful.