Despite being “performative bull-shit,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) managed to find a silver lining in Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s mandate this week that the military will begin testing service members testosterone levels and pursue replacement therapy for those who need it.
“It sounds like gender affirming care to me, so I’m glad he has come around to supporting gender affirming care,” Duckworth quipped on MS NOW’s “The Moment With Katy Tur” on Thursday.
“Look, I’m all for expanding access to healthcare for our troops, but why would we want to stop at testosterone? Let’s expand hormone screenings for all of our brave service members to help us identify fertility issues, for example,” Duckworth argued, citing studies that found that both men and women in the military disproportionately face higher rates of infertility than the general every day American.
She continued: “If the testing reveals hormones are low for men and women, let’s allow all of our heroes to be able to voluntarily sign up for IVF treatment to help them grow their families because frankly, we are more likely to lose our investments in our heroes if they can’t have access to IVF treatment to start their families. They’re going to leave the military after we’ve spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to train them.”
But while Duckworth engaged with Hegseth’s proposal in (somewhat) good faith on Thursday’s MS NOW segment, she expressed little optimism that much positive would come from it, decrying the mandate for testosterone testing as just “more performative bulls–t from the least qualified secretary of defense in our nation’s history.”
“He has no idea what makes our military strong,” she said. “And frankly, he’s failing at the war in Iran. He has no strategy. He has no end plan. He needs to be focused on that and less on testosterone.”
Watch the full “The Moment With Katy Tur” segment in the video below:
On Wednesday, Hegseth announced that military service members 30 years and older will undergo annual testosterone screenings to ensure they can perform at their “absolute best” in the field physically and mentally.
