By Amelia Hansford

Copyright thepinknews

Texas Republican Ronny Jackson has been heavily condemned after calling for the mass institutionalisation of trans people.

The 58-year-old former chief medical advisor made a series of wildly transphobic claims, including that all trans people have an “underlying level of aggressiveness,” while calling for the community to be completely banned from public life.

Appearing on a Tuesday (16 September) Newsmax broadcast, Ronny Jackson claimed, with no evidence, that gender dysphoria is a “psychiatric issue” that needs to be treated.

“These people have psychiatric illnesses to start with… these are people that have gender dysphoria, which is a real psychiatric issue,” he said.

“It’s the reason that we don’t allow them in the military at this particular point, because they have psychiatric issues, and they’re not eligible to serve in the military, as anyone else who had any other psychiatric issue would be.”

Trans people were banned from military service earlier this year after US president Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring that the armed forces had been “afflicted with radical gender ideology.”

Despite Jackson’s claims, the US government has struggled to justify how transitioning would prevent or hinder someone from serving in the military, aside from anti-trans conspiracy theories.

The Texas Republican continued his anti-trans tirade by showing support for so-called ‘conversion‘ therapy and calling on the government to ban trans people from the internet and public life entirely.

“We have to get them off the streets”

“We have to treat these people,” he said. “We have to get them off the streets, and we have to get them off the internet, and we can’t let them communicate with each other… this is a virus, this is a cancer that’s spreading across this country.”

After calling for an entire demographic of people to be prevented from speaking freely, Jackson claimed to be a supporter of “free speech.”

His comments and claims were heavily condemned as “dehumanising” and “outrageous” by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), a US-based LGBTQ+ advocacy group.

Delphine Luneau, a spokesperson for the HRC, said Jackson should “keep his disgusting and malevolent thoughts about transgender people to himself” in a statement to PinkNews.

“Trans people are part of the fabric of society and just trying to live our lives, and we don’t deserve to have self-serving politicians using us as a political punching bag in service to their political ambitions,” she said. “It is a dereliction of his duty as a public servant to spread hateful lies about us, especially as escalating anti-trans hate nationally puts people in harm’s way.

“Instead of bringing people together, this rhetoric serves simply to drive more hate and division. Texans deserve better.”

Jackson faced probe over opiod prescriptions as chief medical adviser

In 2024, Jackson came under fire after a report from the Department of Defense suggested the White House Medical Unit was prescribing controlled substances without oversight during his time serving as the president’s physician

The multi-year investigation into complaints from 2018 accussing an unnamed senior military medical officer of engaging in “improper medical practices” found that a variety of drugs, including opiods and sleep medications were “not properly accounted for,” according to Newsweek.

It further alleged that prescribers “wrote prescriptions for controlled substances that often lacked the medical provider and patient information mandated by [Drug Enforcement Agency] policy.”

Responding to the revelations at the time, New York City attorney and writer, Luppe B Luppen, called for Jackson, who acted as physician for Donald Trump and Barack Obama between 2013 and 2018, to “answer for all of this.”

A spokesperson for Jackson said at the time that the complaints were raised several years after Jackson stepped down as director of the White House Medical Unit in 2014 and that his role as chief medical advisor in 2019 had “no association or involvement with the White House Medical Unit’s clinical delivery of care.”