BATON ROUGE - The Southern University Ag Center has responded to the cancellation of a $600,000 federal grant that Agriculture Secretary mistakenly claimed was to research the menstrual cycles of transgender men.

In a statement posted on the school's web site, the Ag Center said the "Project Farm to Feminine Hygiene" grant's aim was to examine three kinds of natural fibers that can be grown in Louisiana and could be used to create safe, environmentally-friendly menstrual products.

It was to research regenerative cotton, regenerative wool and industrial hemp as the source material for underwear, pads and liners, the statement said. Some existing synthetic products have been found to contain potentially dangerous heavy metals.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced in a tweet that she had canceled the grant after the conservative think tank American Principals Project brought it to her attention.

The grant's description included a sentence mentioning that people who don't identify as women - transgender men, people who identify as non-binary and intersex people - are part of the group of all people who menstruate. It cited previous research that more than one-fourth of the world's population is menstruating at any given moment.

Grant objectives include testing the materials for effectiveness and teaching girls and young women how to create their own environmentally-sustainable menstrual products. It also envisioned a processing facility associated with the Ag Center to develop a manufacturing protocol for the products.

The Ag Center's statement said the efforts could result in safer and healthier products "which would benefit all biological women."

"We are optimistic that in partnership with Sec. Rollins and the USDA, the Southern University Ag Center will continue fueling agricultural innovation through research to benefit the constituents we serve," the statement concluded.

The move appears to be part of a new federal effort to exclude from government anything that benefits people who identify as different from the sex they were assigned at birth.

"The insanity is ending and the restoration of America is underway," Rollins said in the tweet announcing the grant cancelation. She did not provide any further explanation of what put the grant in the category of "insanity."