TWIBS: Disgraced Veteran Spreads Hate About Trans People
Ronny Jackson, U.S. representative and former physician to the president, said some really heinous stuff about trans people… but does he have any room to criticize?
Humor by Aly Gibbs
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s longest running column! Every Friday, Aly Gibbs digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
I know it’s wrong of me… but I kind of love it, actually, when terrible people say the most unhinged shit. Sure, in an ideal world no transphobia would exist, and I would be a much happier person. As long as we’re stuck in the most horrible timeline, though, I’ll take joy in shredding freaks who think they can put hateful invective about my community into the world without anybody clapping back.
To that end, let’s talk about Ronny Jackson. If you aren’t familiar, Ronny has been the U.S. representative for Texas’ 13th Congressional District since 2021. Before that, he was part of the White House Medical Unit starting in the mid-2000s under President George W. Bush, acting as the physician to the president from 2013 to 2018 under presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Jackson is also a Navy veteran who retired at the rank of Rear Admiral, but was later demoted to Captain after an investigation found that, in his capacity as an Admiral, he spent most of his time drunk or zonked out on Ambien. Oopsie!
Now, Ronny’s talking SHIT about trans people! The gall!
Appearing on a Newsmax talkshow hosted by Rob Finnerty, Ronny Jackson said trans people “have psychiatric illnesses” and that “gender dysphoria … is a real psychiatric issue.” Which, sure, I guess. Trans people are often more likely to struggle with their mental health, in particularly suffering from depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder and suicidality… likely as a result of income inequality as a result of employment discrimination, significantly higher risk of sexual assault, and… you know… the fed’s war against trans people.
It turns out that tremendous societal disadvantage and maltreatment fucks you up! There’s no evidence that any of the mental health struggles that trans people face are in some way genetically baked into our very being. Were we treated normally by society, given acceptance and unconditional love, and allowed to succeed in the same way that cisgender people are, it’s very likely that the trans community’s rate of mental illness, addiction, homelessness, etc., would map identically to cisgender people’s risks.
Jackson goes on to say, “It's the reason that we don't allow them in the military at this particular point, because they have psychiatric issues, and they're not eligible to serve in the military, as anyone else who had any other psychiatric issue would be.”
Let me be clear about something, here: Transgender people were purged from the military because Donald Trump and his cronies despise us and want us removed from public life entirely. The military doesn’t care if you’re mentally ill… they just don’t want you to talk about it. When I was young, dumb, propagandized by the state and convinced that I was a big strong man, I talked to one of the predatory army recruiters at my high school about enlisting. I explained that I had been on anti-anxiety medication, and I was worried that might disqualify me from enlisting. What do you think that recruiter told me?
He told me to lie, of course. He said that it was disqualifying, but that we’d just keep it between us. He disposed of the recruitment interest form I’d filled out and gave me another one, because his job was to recruit young idiots into service, and he wanted to get a bonus for meeting his recruitment quota that month. I was a walking dollar sign to him, and nobody would ever have cared that I struggled with anxiety, depression, and tremendous self-loathing… as long as I shut the fuck up about it.
Of trans women specifically, Ronny Jackson said, “They have an underlying level of aggressiveness.” Any Black woman can tell you all about this harmful pejorative stereotype that positions minority women as aggressive, out of control, and even violent for confronting their oppressors. There is no truth in this statement; Ronny just wants to suggest that we’re men who retain our male penchant for violence post-transition. It’s bullshit.
Finally, Ronny says, “We have to treat these people. We have to get them off the streets, and we have to get them off the internet, and we can't let them communicate with each other. I'm all about free speech, but this is a virus, this is a cancer that's spreading across this country.”
I can’t say this strongly enough: this is violent, eliminationist language. Referring to a group of marginalized people as a virus, as a cancer, suggesting they must be disallowed from communicating with each other? Kept from accessing the wider world? This is what somebody says when they want to purge us from modern society, and it’s disgusting and unacceptable.
Fuck you, Ronny Jackson. We aren’t going anywhere, and we will fight you with every fiber of our being if you try to take us. My advice is, stick to what I assume you do best: Keggers, shotgunning brewskies with the boys, and guzzling Ambien.
Aly Gibbs (She/They), formerly Alyssa Steinsiek, is a trans writer who reports on news important to the queer community.
