President Donald Trump mentioned the transgender community half a dozen times throughout his address to Congress on Tuesday, though trans people make up an estimated 1% of the U.S. population.
Less than 15 minutes in, he noted that he had signed an executive order declaring that the federal government will only recognize two unchangeable sexes, male and female, and another order banning trans women from participating in women’s sports.
He then introduced Payton McNabb, who played volleyball in high school in North Carolina and, Trump said, planned to play sports in college until “her girls’ volleyball match was invaded by a male.”
Trump said the player “smashed the ball so hard in Payton’s face causing traumatic brain injury, partially paralyzing her right side and ending her athletic career.”
It’s still unclear whether the player who spiked the ball and hit McNabb during the September 2022 match was trans. McNabb has said in interviews that she and her teammates were aware of a trans player on the team, but that player’s name has not been shared and she has not spoken to the press. Since then, McNabb has become a paid national advocate for state laws prohibiting trans students from playing on school sports teams that match their gender identities. She testified in favor of such a measure in North Carolina, which passed and took effect in August 2023.
Trump then said trans women are hurting other sports, referring to a case in which a trans woman finished a long-distance cycling race and set a record by five hours, beating a cisgender woman. Trump appears to be referring to Austin Killips, a trans woman cyclist who did win the 800-mile Arizona Trail Race in May.
Trump used the same reference before signing the executive order banning trans women and girls from playing in female sports. Killips responded in an op-ed for the Guardian, noting that she did set a course record, though the previous record was held by a man, who had broken a record set by a woman before him.
Killips said the reason she was interested in the event was because it was co-ed and argued that Trump had used her as a scapegoat.
However, Trump on Tuesday said her record — which Killips said has since been broken — is “demeaning for women and it’s very bad for our country.”
‘Making mice transgender’
Trump brought up trans issues again about 20 minutes into his speech, in what many on social media have described as one of the most bizarre moments of the address. He said Elon Musk was helping to find wasteful government spending, including “$8 million for making mice transgender.”
It’s unclear exactly what Trump was referring to, though it appeared to be a subcommittee hearing led by Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., last month titled “Transgender Lab Rats and Poisoned Puppies: Oversight of Taxpayer Funded Animal Cruelty.” During her opening remarks, Mace referred to a report last year from the White Coat Waste Project, a watchdog organization that aims to stop government spending on animal testing, that found more than $10 million in taxpayer funds had been “wasted to create transgender mice, rats, and monkeys in university labs.”
The report included eight studies that received funding from the National Institutes of Health, with most of them studying the effects of hormone therapy. One studies the effects of testosterone and estrogen on wound healing, with the goal of improving care for trans people and developing new approaches for treating millions of patients with chronic wounds.
Another uses mice to study how estrogen and anti-testosterone therapy affects immune response to an HIV vaccine. Trans women are disproportionately affected by HIV, with one study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finding that 42% of transgender women surveyed in seven U.S. cities in 2019-2020 were HIV positive.
The third and fourth studies mentioned in the report examine the effects of hormone therapy, with one specifically focused on how testosterone affects fertility and whether infertility related to testosterone can be reversed if a patient stops taking it.
The remaining studies are reviews and editorials on improving studies and clinical support for LGBTQ patients.
The White House released a statement about Trump's comment Wednesday that referenced most of the above studies and a few more, including one that examines the effects of gender-affirming testosterone therapy on breast cancer risk and treatment, and another that studies the role estrogen plays in how gender influences asthma. None of the studies the White House referenced were specifically focused on "making mice transgender," but rather on the health effects of hormones.
Transgender youth
About an hour into his speech, Trump introduced January Littlejohn, a Florida mom who sued her child’s school district for allegedly creating a plan to allow her child to use a different name and pronouns at school without Littlejohn’s knowledge, which Trump described as “child abuse.”
A judge dismissed Littlejohn’s lawsuit in 2022, after the school district amended the internal support plan for her child. The court also said her claim couldn’t meet the high burden to show that what the school did had violated her parental rights. Littlejohn has appealed.
Her 2021 complaint against the school district states that she was in contact with the school about her child’s “confusion” about the child’s gender. She and her husband agreed to have the child work with a school counselor temporarily, according to the complaint. When the child asked to go by a different name and they/them pronouns ahead of the 2021 school year, Littlejohn and her husband said they wouldn’t make those changes at home but told the child’s math teacher that the child could use the requested name as a nickname, according to Littlejohn’s complaint.
The teacher asked if Littlejohn would like her to share the nickname with other teachers, according to the complaint, which added that Littlejohn did not authorize the teacher to share the nickname.
Additional emails obtained by CNN and the Tallahassee Democrat reportedly show that, in response to the teacher’s question about whether she should share the child’s nickname with other teachers, Littlejohn wrote, “Whatever you think is best or” the child “can handle it herself.”
Littlejohn later told the teacher she appreciated her support and that she was going to allow her child to “take the lead on this,” CNN reported.
In an emailed statement, Littlejohn said that at the time of the emails, she was referring only to the use of a nickname.
“We were not supporting the denial of our daughter’s sex and would have never imagined the creation of a formal transition plan where our daughter would meet alone in a room with three adults who asked her questions that would absolutely impact her upbringing and safety, such as which sexual identity would be assigned to her, which restroom and locker room she would be authorized to would use and whether she would room with males or females on overnight field trips,” Littlejohn said.
She added that she “never would have expected that we, as parents, would be cut out of such personal and consequential decisions.”
Littlejohn’s case has been used by conservatives to lobby for state legislation supporting parents rights to information about how their children are identifying at school and barring schools from referring to students with a different name or pronouns without their parent’s permission. Five states have enacted legislation that would require school staff to notify parents if a student asks to use a different name or pronouns, which critics refer to as “forced outing” legislation.
Just after introducing Littlejohn, Trump noted that he had signed an order “to cut off all taxpayer funding to any institution that engages in the sexual mutilation of our youth,” using inflammatory language to describe transition-related medical care, which is supported by major medical associations in the U.S. That order has since been blocked by two federal judges.
He went on to say that he planned to ask Congress to pass a bill “permanently banning and criminalizing sex changes on children and forever ending the lie that any child is trapped in the wrong body,” in effect denying the existence of trans youth.
