On Tuesday, Fox News host Tucker Carlson and guest Candace Owens of The Daily Wire attacked USA Today’s recent selection of Adm. Rachel Levine as one of a dozen women recognized as part of its Women of the Year program. During the Tucker Carlson Tonight segment, just one of a host of right-wing attacks against Levine over the recognition, Carlson and Owens consistently misgendered Levine and deployed hateful anti-trans rhetoric, furthering their record of attacking both Levine and trans people broadly.
Levine was honored by the paper for her role in helping to fight the COVID-19 pandemic as assistant secretary for health. She is both the highest-ranking transgender official in the U.S. and the country’s first woman four-star officer, serving as an admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps.The division of the Department of Health and Human Services is composed of health professionals who address public health crises through treatment and research, a role that has been instrumental during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Beyond discussing the pandemic, Levine touched on topics including body image challenges and the critical roles women have played in effecting positive social change. She was also asked if she had any advice for trans people, responding that it was important “to be true to yourself.”
Levine has long been at the receiving end of transphobic attacks, facing misgendering and other public harassment for her identity while serving as health secretary of Pennsylvania under Gov. Tom Wolf.
Carlson opened Tuesday’s segment by repeating lies about Levine’s record in Pennsylvania, saying she “forced nursing homes to take COVID-positive patients even as Levine snuck Levine's mother into a private facility.” In reality, the steps she took to readmit previously positive-testing patients followed federal guidance, and Levine’s mother personally chose to leave the home she was living in, which was not even under Levine’s supervision.
Adding to his history of denying the qualifications of trans women, Carlson called Levine a “fake admiral,” even though her division is a uniformed service subject to the same laws that apply to all branches of the military and whose members earn the same benefits as any military veteran. Levine currently serves as professor of pediatrics and psychology at Penn State University and graduated from Harvard College and Tulane University School of Medicine.
Carlson’s guest Candace Owens joined in on attacking Levine, claiming during her appearance that “we are actually erasing women,” and bashing trans athletes, asserting, “Now you can just throw on a wig and say, ‘Actually, I'm a woman, too’ and you can crush all of their records.” The Daily Wire host also charged Hillary Clinton, who last sought elected office six years ago, with being “quiet on [the] topic” of “men taking the spots of women,” which Owens characterized as an “existential crisis.” (Trans people represent just over 1% of the U.S. population, and Levine was one of 12 women given the USA Today title and one of 59 total women honored by the program this year.)
Owens further escalated rhetoric into conspiracy theories, speculating that Levine’s recognition by a newspaper “gets back to Marxist ideology. …It’s always about disrupting the family unit. The government gains more power when people are confused, right? If you don’t know whether you’re a woman or a man, you’re not going to have a functional nuclear family unit, right? Instead you’re going to be dysfunctional, and dysfunctional people tend to rely upon the government. That’s what is happening right now. That’s what you are seeing this push for.”