Dear taxpayers,
Hi, I’m Mickey. Yes, I am one of the trans mice that Donald Trump keeps talking about, and yes, I regret voting for him. If you’re anything like me, you were probably shocked and appalled to hear Trump announce to Congress that, among other examples of wasteful government spending, he plans to cut the “8 million for making mice transgender.”
Apparently, he thinks my own personal maze to explore my gender identity is a part of a million-dollar government project. How could he say something so hateful? First of all, nobody’s making me anything. I was born this way. (Well, actually, I was cloned this way.) And second, my trans identity has no impact on my role in government research: I’m just your run-of-the-wheel transgenic mouse, genetically engineered to help study specific diseases.
This is especially stinging because I voted for him… twice. Before you quickly write me off as just some uninformed MAGA supporter, I want to make it clear that I had good motives each time. Back in 2016, I was living in an Alzheimer’s lab in the North-West Wing, when I noticed the cart that brings our daily allotment of cheese kept coming later and later. Doing my own research revealed that the cart had been delivering to a brand new Alzheimer’s lab, which had just been funded in our Southern Wing. I was scared, not only were these new mice getting cheese that could’ve gone to me, but what if their research outpaced that of my own labs? I thought it was incredibly unfair that these new mice could just come in, take our jobs, and get handed all the credit, while we hardworking mice have been here the whole time. While Trump didn’t mention the new mice problem explicitly, I thought his comments about immigrants were a dog whistle alluding to our situation here in the North-West Wing.
That being said, in 2020, I voted blue. I thought Trump handled COVID terribly, and I found it abhorrent that he blamed it on a “lab outbreak.” But when this past November rolled around, I was torn. On the one hand, I felt like Trump didn’t follow through on his promises during his first term, but I was so tired of Kamala’s disingenuous schtick about bodily autonomy and “the right to choose.” Yeah, right, what a joke. Everyone knows that whether you have kids/ get cloned again is not up to you or the courts; it’s up to the people with the machines down the hallway…DUH. Also, I just wouldn’t really trust a woman in office. What if she gets her period? Whenever they inject me with extra hormones, I have to be isolated and observed for at least three days –– what would happen if a war breaks out while Madam President is in her sequestered period?? I ultimately chose Trump, but really RFK was my first choice. I liked how he was going down the food chain, eating all of us mice’s natural predators.
Anyway, so here we are. Trans mice are real, and we are not going anywhere. We are just as much a part of the laboratory community as any other cis transgenic mice. If you’re that concerned with what’s between my legs, just know: it’s my tail.
