Pete Hegseth

—Ordered the Navy to rename the USNS Harvey Milk, stripping the ship of the name of the slain LGBTQ rights activist who served as a sailor during the Korean War. In 2016, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus named the USNS Harvey Milk. He stated that the John Lewis-class of oilers would be named after civil and human rights leaders. A defense official confirmed that the announcement, during Pride month, was intentional. CBS reported that the Navy is also considering renaming other John Lewis-class oilers including the USNS Thurgood Marshall, USNS Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and USNS Harriet Tubman.

—Said, “No more pronouns. No more climate change obsession. No more emergency vaccine mandates. No more dudes in dresses, we’re done with that shit,” in a keynote address at Special Operations Forces Week 2025.

—Baselessly said transgender soldiers are “not deployable” because they are “reliant on chemicals” and suggested that women should not serve in certain combat roles. There is no evidence of this.

—Baselessly said “being transgendered [sic] in the military causes complications and differences.”

—Supported the Trump administration ban on transgender people from military service, stating that those with gender dysphoria should be expelled from the military and their healthcare eliminated. No evidence was ever produced demonstrating a need for the ban. 41 retired generals and admirals said the former president’s ban compromised military integrity. Service Chiefs of all five military branches testified that transgender-inclusive service was successful.

—Opposed the New York Times’s decision to announce same-sex marriages writing that it was a path to incest and bestiality: “At what point does the paper deem a ‘relationship’ unfit for publication? What if we ‘loved’ our sister and wanted to marry her? Or maybe two women at the same time? A 13-year-old? The family dog?”

—As publisher of the conservative magazine The Princeton Tory, he railed against efforts to promote diversity on campus and what he described as the immoral “homosexual lifestyle.”  He wrote that the Tory’s “argument [that the homosexual lifestyle is ‘abnormal and immoral’] is not that such-and-such is a bad person because they’re gay. It’s the lifestyle of homosexuality that we consider immoral.” He wrote that he was “not encouraged” by the “educational principles … guiding our generation,” and cited  “encouragement and support” for “homosexuality.”