A Woman Is a Woman Until She's a Boy
The curious worldview of Pete Hegseth.
[This blog will always be free to read, but it’s also how I pay my bills. If you have suggestions or feedback on how I can earn your paid subscription, shoot me an email: cmclymer@gmail.com. And many thanks to my dear friend Shannon Watts for inspiring this piece; you should buy her new, NYT-bestselling book “Fired Up”]
This morning, Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Secretary of Defense, delivered what could most charitably be called a pretty bad press conference.
Less charitably, it would be fair to say Mr. Hegseth bombed his press conference more effectively than he did Iran.
He angrily ranted at reporters for fairly challenging the administration’s confused and incomplete—to put it mildly—narrative on the operation. They still don’t know if Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile was destroyed, let alone if the facilities were fully destroyed.
A preliminary report this week from the Defense Intelligence Agency—that would be, you know, our own intelligence professionals—cast doubt on the overall result of the operation, undercutting Trump’s spurious claim that the facilities had been “obliterated.”
Today, John Ratcliffe, Trump’s CIA chief, weakly attempted to spin the mess amid serious concerns that Iran’s nuclear development was delayed only by months, not “years” as the administration claimed.
Meanwhile, no one was exempt from Hegseth’s rage in response to the skepticism.
He even spat out that Jennifer Griffin of Fox News is “the worst” for questioning whether highly enriched uranium was at Iran’s Fordo site when the U.S. bombed it, given satellite imagery showing trucks there just days prior, which suggests it may have been moved before the bombing.
He also bizarrely claimed the recent air strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities were “the most complex and secretive military operation in history.”
Not D-Day. Not the raid that killed bin Laden. Not anything done in recent memory by the storied Delta Force.
No, he firmly believes the air strikes were somehow more secretive and complex, despite being tipped by the Pentagon Pizza Report (a Twitter account monitoring abnormal fast food consumption at restaurants near the Pentagon, suggesting busy activity there), various flight trackers, and Trump’s own statements in the week preceding the attack.
In tones ranging from petulant to irate, Hegseth blustered through the entire presser, clearly incensed that he’s forced to be the face of a military operation that’s attracting greater skepticism with each passing day.
So, it really wasn’t all that surprising when Hegseth blew up at a reporter for asking why he referred to the pilots involved in the operation as “the boys” when at least one woman was among these professionals:
“When I say something like our boys in bombers — see this is the kind of thing the press does, right?… When you spin it as because I say ‘our boys in bombers’ as a common phrase, I’ll keep saying things like that whether they’re men or women.”
It would have been a fair question from the reporter even under normal circumstances with an operation like this—though, what the hell passes for ‘normal’ these days, I suppose—but it’s especially pertinent given the Trump administration’s obsession with trans people and Hegseth’s own history of generally disparaging remarks about women in the military.
It’s really quite simple. These folks have been laser-focused on their silly maxim that there are only two genders—which is incorrect—when what they really mean is there are only two sexes, which is also incorrect (scientifically so).
They have long raged against any notion that trans people exist (let alone whether we should exist), and their political ideology, which could aptly be described as a short stack of bumperstickers, has revolved around a supposed gotcha question (“What is a woman?) and a flood of anti-trans propaganda fueled by a supposed concern for women being erased in the public square.
Hegseth’s take on the operation was a literal erasure of the woman involved, of course, but it was his doubling down that it’s fine to refer to a woman as “a boy” that raised eyebrows.
A grown woman, among the best trained combat pilots in the world, was referred to as “a boy” by a Defense Secretary who wakes up every morning with a personal vendetta against anyone who expresses the slightest fluidity in gender terminology.
He now thinks it doesn’t matter, but if it doesn’t matter, as Shannon Watts smartly observed, wouldn’t it be fine to refer to this fine group of pilots as “the girls”?
I think we all know the answer to that.
Hegseth has always seemed intractably insecure over women in the military.
Just last year, he argued on a podcast that women don’t belong in combat. During his confirmation hearing, he claimed women graduating combat schools—including the famous U.S. Army Ranger School—are being held to lower standards (this is demonstrably false; women are held to the same exact standards in these courses).
Central to his misogynistic philosophy on women in the military is that we simply lack the emotional strength for combat. This is coming from a man who was practically on the verge of tears because reporters had the temerity to ask basic questions about the outcome of a serious military operation.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I seriously question if men are too emotional to be in positions of leadership.
I’m solely basing that on Hegseth’s weepy instability at today’s presser and during Signalgate and during his confirmation process and when he was fired by two separate veterans organizations and his heavy drinking in the workplace and his volatility in personal interactions with the women in his life.
You might be a man reading this who’s inclined to respond: “But Charlotte, it doesn’t seem fair to characterize all men because of the actions of one emotionally unstable man in power.”
And to that I say:
Calm down. Don’t be so emotional. It’s just a joke. You should smile more.
Girl! Remind me to never get on your bad side. “it would be fair to say Mr. Hegseth bombed his press conference more effectively than he did Iran.” 🤣
“You should smile more!” 😎