First they came for your children. As Donald Trump has claimed without evidence (because facts are woke), US schoolkids have been getting gender-reassignment surgery in between classes. “Can you imagine you’re a parent and … you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much. Go have a good day in school,’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation,” Trump said during a rally in 2024. “What the hell is wrong with our country?”

Now it seems the woke brigade has come for poor little mice. According to Republican congresswoman Nancy Mace, who once called herself “Trump in high heels”, American taxpayers are funding transgender rodents. Last week Mace, who is leaving politics next year after coming last in her state’s Republican primary for governor, promoted a new bill called the TRANS MICE Act, designed to “put an end to the use of taxpayer dollars for radical transgender-related experiments on animals”.

After Mace announced this bill on X, numerous people pointed out that she appeared to have made an embarrassing mousetake. A community note on her post pointed out that “‘Trans mice’ refers to transgenic mice, not transgender mice.” These are genetically engineered mice, which are sometimes used for cancer research. In a follow-up post, Mace denied that this is what she meant and urged people to read more about her very important bill.

To be fair, it’s possible that Mace did not mix up transgender and transgenic. It’s possible she just has a mouse-sized brain and wilfully misinterpreted some experiments relating to sex hormone function that went viral in 2025. Last year the group Americans for Medical Progress, which supports animal testing in biomedical research, issued a statement correcting misinformation circulating about “transgender mice”. It noted that certain research grants that had caught the eye of the Trump administration and rightwing influencers were not related to making mice transgender but understanding the role of sex hormones in certain medical conditions.

Republicans rarely admit that they’re wrong, so I suspect that the more pushback Mace gets on her trans mice bill, the more she’ll dig her high heels in. Perhaps as her next act she’ll be demanding federal investigations into transmission fluid and transatlantic flights. Or maybe she’ll go beyond rodentity politics and take a deeper look at the animal kingdom. I’ve heard that male seahorses give birth and a group of lions is called a pride – which all sounds a bit gay to me. Quick, someone get Nancy Mace on the case.

Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

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