CNN has once again found itself walking back a so-called fact-check after initially claiming that President Donald Trump had “falsely” asserted that federal money was spent on transgender experiments with mice. As it turns out—Trump was right.
The controversy began after Trump’s Joint Session of Congress address, where he called out government waste identified by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—including $8 million in taxpayer-funded research on “making mice transgender.”
Enter CNN journalist Deirde McPhillips, who quickly jumped to dismiss Trump’s statement, claiming it was “false” and that the money was actually for hormone therapy studies involving monkeys, not mice. In a draft of her fact-check, she argued that these NIH-funded projects focused on how feminizing hormone therapy affects HIV treatment, particularly for transgender women.
But then—the White House released the actual list of grants.
It turns out that federal dollars were indeed used for studies involving mice receiving gender-transition treatments, including one that specifically investigated the effects of cross-sex testosterone on male mice. Faced with undeniable evidence, CNN quietly edited its fact-check, changing Trump’s claim from “false” to “needs context”—a classic media pivot when they’re caught downplaying a story that’s inconvenient for their narrative.
The revised version now acknowledges that Trump was technically correct, but CNN still tries to soften the blow:
“The White House list made clear what Trump, in the speech, did not: The studies were meant to figure out how these treatments might affect the health of humans who take them, not for the purpose of making mice transgender.”
So, in other words, the government did fund experiments that gave mice gender-transition treatments, but CNN wants you to believe that this somehow isn’t what Trump meant.
The fact-check now even carries a correction, admitting that an earlier version “incorrectly characterized as false” Trump’s claim. In reality, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has since canceled seven grants, including:
- $532,000 to “use a mouse model to investigate the effects of cross-sex testosterone treatment”
- $33,000 to test “feminizing hormone therapy in the male rat”
What makes this even worse for CNN? They still don’t explain where their initial “fact-check” got the $8 million figure wrong in the first place. Instead, they attempt to muddy the waters by shifting focus to the intent of the studies rather than the plain fact that taxpayer money was funding gender-transition experiments on animals.
