Gender-affirming care for fascists

I’ve got a pet theory that if you wanted to focus on one thing that is at the core of the reactionary insanity that has brought us Donald Trump as avatar of the contemporary American right wing, that thing would be sex and gender anxiety. Key terms here include gay as a pejorative, feminine and every variation on that concept, also as pejoratives, cuckold, transgender, the closet, erectile dysfunction, micro-penis . . . there are a lot. Rick Perlstein could do a whole book called Cuckland and I would definitely read that is what I’m saying here.

You don’t exactly have to be a Roland Barthes of contemporary semiotics to find the hidden texts of this discourse, either:

Under a new policy from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, all military service members aged 30 and up, including women, will receive annual screenings for low testosterone. Promoting the plan to soldiers as a way to “optimize your performance” and remain on the “leading edge of lethality,” Hegseth said in a Wednesday video announcement that anyone with testosterone deficiency would be offered voluntary hormone replacement therapy.

In a post on X, Hegseth laid out a pithy ambition for the policy: “the High-T Department of War.”

The framing fits neatly within a growing trend of hormonal obsession on the right. Over the past several years, in corners of the internet, media, and politics devoted to an exacting vision of masculine supremacy, testosterone has become a substance of mythical importance. Calling a political opponent or message-board adversary “low-T” is the new “soy boy,” “beta,” or “gay.” Right-wing influencers are touting dubious pills that promise to increase testosterone production for more energy, bigger muscles, and better boners. The Trump administration is bragging that the president has the highest T level Dr. Oz has ever seen in a man over 70.

Of course, screening our warfighters for “low testosterone” is identical to screening them for the presence of women, which I’m disappointed that the always interesting Christina Cauterucci didn’t point out in the linked piece. She does get to the core of the issue though:

It’s no surprise that an administration invested in, say, banning trans women from athletics has a skewed sense of what this humble hormone can do. Testosterone squarely sits at the intersection of three of the right’s favorite fixations: extremist gender performance, cure-all medical promises, and opportunities for hucksters to bilk money from underinformed people with legitimate problems. It used to be that manosphere-podcast devotees were the ones shelling out for unnecessary testosterone treatments promising ultimate male gender conformity. Now, if Hegseth’s policy comes to pass, taxpayers will start footing the bill

That Pete Hegseth is forcing the DOD to undertake gender-affirming care for fascism is about the least surprising thing in the world, but it’s important to be clear that this is what’s going on here.

Relatedly, this diatribe from Fox News All-Star Jesse Watters reads like something out of a radical feminist satire from the 1970s:

There have been a lot of demands for Watters to apologize for this “joke.”

It’s not a joke. It’s just rape culture with the filter off, just like the entire Trump administration is racism with the filter off, plutocratic grifting with the filter off, etc etc.

Since both permanent war and heroism are difficult games to play, the Ur-Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters. This is the origin of machismo (which implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality). Since even sex is a difficult game to play, the Ur-Fascist hero tends to play with weapons — doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise.

Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism”