There are few things that have left me as angry as I was last night before going to bed. Learning that the Secretary of Defense stood at the Iowa State Fair and used a derogatory slur against transgender people was one of them.

Let’s start with the obvious: the Secretary of Defense should know better. This is not some random guy shouting at a carnival game. This is a cabinet secretary, a senior official of the United States government, and the person entrusted with leading the Department of Defense. There is a baseline level of dignity that ought to come with the office. Pete Hegseth apparently left that at the door along with whatever understanding he once possessed of the responsibilities of his job.

And no, this was not some unfortunate slip of the tongue. He was making a political point. He preceded the remark with an attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion and then decided that the best way to demonstrate his supposed commitment to a “warrior ethos” was to demean transgender people.

That tells you everything you need to know about what he thinks strength looks like.

Apparently, in Hegseth’s world, being a warrior means finding a marginalized group to ridicule in front of a cheering crowd.

That is not strength. It is insecurity with a microphone.

It is also an astonishingly pathetic way for the Secretary of Defense to spend his time.

There are American service members who are being asked to serve in extraordinarily dangerous circumstances. There are families who worry every time their loved ones deploy. There are military personnel dealing with the consequences of decisions made by people sitting safely behind desks. There are enormous questions about military readiness, strategy, leadership, and the wars this administration has undertaken.

And the Secretary of Defense went to the Iowa State Fair and decided that transgender people were the problem that needed addressing.

Seriously?

This is what you have for us?

If Hegseth wants to talk about a warrior ethos, then let’s talk about actual warriors. Let’s talk about the people who put on the uniform and do the job. Let’s talk about competence, discipline, preparation, courage, leadership, and accountability. Let’s talk about whether the people responsible for sending Americans into harm’s way actually know what they are doing.

Instead, we got playground masculinity dressed up as national security policy.

And the DEI rhetoric makes this even more grotesque.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion are not secret code words for destroying the military. They are three extremely ordinary words describing the idea that people should not be excluded from opportunities because of who they are. The administration’s obsession with purging anything associated with DEI has repeatedly demonstrated that the actual target is not some abstract bureaucratic philosophy. It is the people they have decided do not belong.

Transgender Americans are one of those targets.

We’ve spent the past month watching this happen over and over again, and I am exhausted by it. I am exhausted by having to watch transgender people turned into a political football by people who will never have to live with the consequences of their rhetoric. I am exhausted by the endless insinuation that our existence is somehow a threat to everyone else’s existence. I am exhausted by hearing people debate whether people like me deserve the same rights as everyone else as though our citizenship were a question on a multiple-choice test.

And after everything that has happened recently, Hegseth’s remarks were particularly difficult to hear. The past month has included more than enough casual cruelty directed at transgender women. The fallout from Sophie Cunningham’s comments about not wanting to play with transgender women has been dehumanizing. It has been exhausting to watch people treat transgender women as though we are some invading force rather than human beings trying to live our lives.

I don’t know why this needs to be explained yet again, but apparently it does: transgender Americans are Americans. We pay taxes. We go to work. We go to school. We have families. We have friends. We worry about rent and groceries and whether we remembered to charge our phones. We watch movies, complain about traffic, make dinner, go to the doctor, argue with our siblings, celebrate birthdays, mourn people we love, and try to get through the week. We are not a threat merely because we exist.

And I did not choose this. I did not wake up one morning and decide that being transgender sounded like an interesting way to make my life unnecessarily complicated. I was born this way. Believe me, nobody seriously wants to spend the rest of their life navigating hormones, doctors, insurance companies, and the endless political circus surrounding their existence. But for me, transition is not a political statement. It is my life, and it is what allows me to be alive and to have a life worth living.

That is the part that people like Hegseth never seem interested in understanding. They talk about transgender people as abstractions. They talk about us as a category to be eliminated, a policy problem to be solved, a punchline to be delivered at a state fair. They don’t talk about the actual human beings on the receiving end of that rhetoric, because it is very easy to make a joke about transgender people when you don’t have to look one of us in the eye afterward.

It is very easy to stand on a stage, bask in applause, and prove how masculine you are by punching down at people with less political power than you have. It is considerably harder to demonstrate courage through actual leadership.

And that brings us back to the Secretary of Defense. If Hegseth really wants to restore a “warrior ethos,” perhaps he should start by remembering that leadership is not about how loudly you can demean someone. It is about whether the people entrusted to you can trust you. It is about competence. It is about judgment. It is about taking responsibility when things go wrong instead of finding someone else to blame.

A competent Secretary of Defense does not need transgender people as a prop. A confident Secretary of Defense does not need a slur to prove his masculinity. A serious Secretary of Defense does not need to turn a military institution into a stage for partisan grievance. And a secure man does not need to spend his afternoon at the Iowa State Fair trying to convince everyone how much of a man he is.

The truly remarkable thing about Hegseth's performance is that he apparently believes this makes him look strong. It doesn’t. It makes him look like a man with nothing better to say.

And if the Secretary of Defense has nothing more substantial to offer the American people than contempt for transgender Americans, perhaps the problem isn’t the existence of transgender people. Perhaps the problem is the person standing at the microphone.

Because I am done accepting the premise that my existence is somehow the problem that needs fixing. I am not the threat. I am not the punchline. And I am not going anywhere.