Conservatives and the Big T
To the editor:
Recently, Pete Hegseth, head of the Department of War - which is a fun name if you’re an 8-year-old on the playground or developing your own board game - mandated testosterone screening for soldiers with the option of replacement therapy should testing result in a low level. I’m sure if personnel refuse treatment they will not be retired from service like some sort of racehorse put out to stud - no doubt a future requirement for receiving military benefits that Hegseth is swirling around in his little peanut shell. The Great Republican Obsession with testosterone is weird. Beyond just being creepy, it shows the insecurity of conservatives.
Don’t get me wrong, I am all for hormone replacement therapy (HRT) should a person really need and desire that kind of treatment. However, conservatives cannot fathom anything beyond the enhancement of the binary, and if anyone deviates from the preapproved course of action it’s deemed blasphemous. It speaks to their inner inferiority complex which I’m sure is in no way exacerbated by getting our fannies handed to us by Iran. Their male egos are so bruised and insecure that they want to subjugate others to their preconceived notions of manhood. In essence, they want to groom people into alignment.
And the lady conservatives? They accept their inferiority due to their low stock of this magical mystery juice. They actually desire to be subjugated whether they are a little old lady or a basketball star. When someone like Sophie Cunningham (Indiana Fever, WNBA) says trans athletes should not compete in girls’ sports, they concede that men are better than women at, well, everything. Period. End of story. It is a very simple mentality to follow that keeps everyone inside a neat little box.
I understand the fear. People don’t want to have someone with an unfair biological advantage outshine them. But where is that adamance when someone of the same biological gender who is a foot taller than them, or predisposed to have more muscle mass, is allowed in their league? The argument quickly falls to pieces considering a sport like basketball is one of the most obvious places to have unfair biological advantages within the same gender. There are no height or weight minimums or maximums. There is no percent body fat criteria. Fun side note, body mass index (BMI) is calculated the same way for men and women.
Maybe they worry because girls have hollow bones with bird-like brittleness. Or maybe it just all comes down to the genitally obsessed and their misconception of what makes a woman a woman and a man a man. If it’s not their idea of what makes a woman then it must not be a woman. If you cannot be overshadowed by the testosterone kings of the NBA then you should not be in the WNBA. Inferiority becomes the point.
In the case of alcoholic Nazis running the military, inferiority is also the point. To Hegseth, transgender women are denying their male prowess, and that angers him. But he won’t accept transgender men, despite a likely willingness to utilize testosterone, because he does not feel they are men but women, and, as conservatives have clearly established, women are meant to be subordinate. To be fair, Hegseth did not use gender specific language in this “Big T” announcement. But given his propensity to denigrate women and anger toward transgender service members, the message is very clear. After all, “Big T” is just one letter away from “bigot.”
Conservative men feel so subaltern that they concoct norms to make themselves feel more superior and macho. Pushing HRT in order to “kill people and break things” - Hegseth’s words, not mine - in the name of man-ness exploits their self-gratifying, yet self-loathing, healthcare policy. HRT cannot be used for the betterment of a person as a whole, but as long as therapy makes a war machine out of a weenie, and renders ladies perpetually inferior, then treatment is free.