Chrissy Houlahan wanted to be a Navy pilot just like her dad and grandfather. But growing up in the 1980s there were very few women flying in the Navy so her dad urged her to consider the Air Force, which had more female enlistees.
There were roadblocks there, too — women could fly but not as combat pilots until four years after she joined.
“You get used to being an outlier,” as a woman in the military, Houlahan, who represents Chester County in Congress, said in an interview last week. “For me, that wasn’t the problem. It was more that there were these restrictions.”
Now, the Pennsylvania Democrat, who served as an engineer in the Air Force, before a second career teaching high school chemistry, is on the front lines of a debate over the future of women in the military. She’s one of the most vocal lawmakers pushing back on Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and changes she thinks could have a chilling effect on the role of women in the armed services.
As Houlahan greeted constituents walking into a cafetorium in Downingtown for her town hall last week, clips of her grilling Hegseth at a July hearing played on loop on TVs set up inside.
Hegseth reignited a battle over women’s roles in the military when he said last month that he would issue new directives to ensure every combat position “returns to the highest male standard” of their service’s physical fitness test.
Gender-neutral standards already exist for combat roles, but the definition of what qualifies as a combat role could expand under the new guidelines. And his changes also include daily physical training for every service member, height and weight requirements, and a biannual fitness test that will account for age, but not gender.
“If that means no women qualify for some combat jobs, so be it,” he said at a convening of 800 military generals last week, though he also stressed that the military would continue to welcome women into its ranks.
Houlahan told The Inquirer she sees the changes as a “defining moment.”
“What is a ‘male’ standard?” she asked. “Even those words put together, by definition, means that females are not part of male standards.”
Houlahan, who served three years on active duty and an additional 13 years as a reserve, fears the effort could reduce the role of women in combat and more broadly female interest in the military.
Currently, around 3,800 women are serving in frontline Army combat roles across infantry, cavalry, armor, and field artillery roles. Roughly 1,000 are serving across other branches.
“He has shown his intent and I’m enormously disappointed,” she said. “Because women are enormously capable and talented, and the kind of modern warfare that we’re engaging in is not what I think that he imagines warfare is.”
‘The badasses’
Houlahan entered Congress along with a historic wave of women elected in 2018. Four were fellow first-time candidates with national security backgrounds who she’d gotten to know on the trail: Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, both ex-CIA officers; and Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey and Elaine Luria of Virginia, who were naval officers.
They called themselves “the badasses.” Houlahan is unsure who coined the term.
“Abigail, she was so mortified by it, it was so non-genteel,” Houlahan said of Spanberger, who is currently running to be governor of Virginia.
Sherrill is running to be governor of New Jersey and Slotkin is now a U.S. senator. In a moment when Democrats have very little power in Washington, the lawmakers have joined Houlahan in using their platforms to criticize Hegseth.
“Eliminating the current highly rigorous standards for women in combat positions has nothing to do with increasing lethality and everything to do with forcing women out of the Armed Services,” Sherrill, a retired Navy combat pilot, said in a statement after the secretary’s announcement.
President Donald Trump and Republicans have enthusiastically backed Hegseth — including GOP women with military experience.
Rep. Sheri Biggs (R., S.C.), a former lieutenant colonel in the Air National Guard, said in a statement to Politico last week: “I’ve seen firsthand what keeps our military strong: discipline and an unwavering focus on mission readiness. I fully support President Trump and Secretary Hegseth’s leadership in restoring standards that put excellence and accountability above politics.”
There are currently nine female service members in Congress, the most in history. More could be joining them. A group of four Democratic women with military backgrounds are running for office in this election cycle. They’re on a group chat called “Hellcats.”
“There’s so many more women in Congress who have military backgrounds, because the doors were open for more people to do more things,” Houlahan said. “And I think that makes a difference.”
Defining lethality
Houlahan leaned into her microphone in June 2025 at a House Armed Services Committee hearing and laid out all the ways a soldier can kill someone.
Pulling a trigger, operating an unmanned drone, launching a missile, piloting a jet or a helicopter.
“Would you say both men and women are generally speaking capable of causing death?” she asked.
“It depends,” Hegseth responded.
Hegseth has touted a “warrior ethos” as he pursues his mission to create the most lethal military in the world.
“Lethality is equal parts technical skills, tactical experience, cognitive problem solving, and physical fitness,” Houlahan argued at the hearing.
Houlahan, who ran as a moderate to represent a purple suburban district, is a thoughtful and careful politician, measured in her comments, meticulously dressed, not particularly known for fiery back-and-forths.
Her exchanges with Hegseth have shined a spotlight on her, though.
Houlahan said she does not have a relationship with Hegseth (or his cell phone number). She has cosigned several letters to his office seeking more clarity on his planned changes.
Since taking office, Hegseth has sharply cut back on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and eliminated some programs explicitly set up to recruit women.
Earlier this year, he announced plans to phase out a program designed to promote women’s involvement in peace building and conflict prevention, dismissing it as “another woke, divisive social justice initiative from the Biden administration.”
Just last week, he also disbanded the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services — a group established nearly 100 years ago under President Harry S. Truman.
“I don’t want my son serving alongside troops who are out of shape, or in combat units with females who can’t meet the same combat arms physical standards as men,” Hegseth said last week. “This job is life and death. Standards must be met.”
Houlahan stressed to The Inquirer that she agrees military standards are important — equally and fairly applied. Her worry is that Hegseth’s ultimate goal is to have no women serving in combat roles.
Pentagon spokesperson Kingsley Wilson rejected this notion in a statement to The Inquirer Tuesday evening.
“Our standards for combat arms positions will be elite, uniform, and sex neutral because the weight of a rucksack or a human being doesn’t care if you’re a man or a woman,” Wilson said in a statement. “We will not compromise our standards to satisfy quotas or an ideological agenda — this is common sense.”
The Pentagon also pointed to numbers Wilson shared at an August briefing that showed the number of women enlisting had increased compared to the previous year as of that point.
In his book, The War on Warriors: Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free, Hegseth wrote that “women cannot physically meet the same standards as men.”
“Dads push us to take risks. Moms put the training wheels on our bikes,” he wrote. “We need moms. But not in the military, especially in combat units.”
Houlahan noted women have served in the military for more than 200 years. “Women can and do serve with lethality today. We can and do all of the jobs that are required of us,” she told him at the hearing.
‘Why would you go there?’
There’s also the complicated question of what qualifies as a combat role.
Houlahan served in the Air Force as an engineer working on air and space defense technologies at a time when few countries had the technological military advancements that exist today. The “front line” is more blurry now. Logistical support jobs can be deadly. People serving in noncombat roles can be fatal combatants if they need to.
And if women are screened out of some key roles or opt not to apply, the military is worse off, she said.
“There’s a lot of places where women can go that men can’t go, and a lot of things that women can learn that men can’t, you know, places that men can’t be. And these women in peace and security were those women who were able to find out information that others couldn’t find out.”
When she looks at who the military is focusing its recruitment efforts on, Houlahan sees a very specific type of person.
“I don’t want anybody performing anything that isn’t up to standards, and I want to make sure that whoever I’m standing next to is somebody that I have full faith in,” she said.
“But I think that we’re at this point where we’re defining that, I’ll be honest, as like, a 250-pound white guy from the South who’s Christian. That’s not a fair portrait of the modern military.”
Houlahan grew up on a military base in Hawaii, and her hero was Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, and her ultimate goal was to become an astronaut. She went to Stanford, like Ride, and graduated from ROTC. She was the only woman in her class — but felt welcomed, she said.
She worries it’s a different message from the Department of Defense today.
“If you were a talented person, no matter what gender, you have many choices,” she said. “If you feel as though there’s a place that doesn’t want you, then why would you go there?”