The Same Exam
The Pentagon will screen troops for low testosterone through the same annual health assessment it used, the previous year, to identify transgender service members for separation. Set alongside the removal of a disproportionate share of the military's senior women, a pattern emerges in how "fit to serve" has been defined under Pete Hegseth — and it does not hold still.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced on Wednesday, July 15, that service members age 30 and older will be screened annually for testosterone deficiency, with testosterone replacement therapy available to those a military physician diagnoses. Troops under 30 may opt in. Treatment, if recommended, remains the individual's choice.
In a video posted to X, Hegseth said he was authorizing the program to ensure service members have the right hormone levels to operate at their "absolute best." He described it as "not about artificial enhancement," but about restoring natural capabilities and ensuring troops have the "biological foundation required to sustain the fight." He called the individual warfighter the military's most decisive tactical advantage and maintaining it a "sacred duty." The video was captioned "The High-T Department of War" — a reference to the administration's rebranding of the department, authorized as a secondary title by executive order in September 2025, though the statutory name, which only Congress can change, remains the Department of Defense.
Service members could already obtain testosterone testing and therapy through Tricare. The new element is not access but universality — and the instrument through which it will be delivered.
The screening will be folded into the periodic health assessment, the annual physical troops already complete. That detail matters more than it first appears, and this investigation returns to it below.
What The Medicine Supports
Testosterone declines with age — roughly 1 percent per year after 30 or 40, a change the Mayo Clinic characterizes as normal aging rather than disorder. A clinical deficiency requires more: symptoms, plus at least two separate earlymorning blood tests showing low levels, according to the American Urological Association. The AUA estimates up to a third of men currently prescribed testosterone do not meet that threshold. The Food and Drug Administration does not approve the therapy for men without an underlying medical condition, though in April 2026 it moved to expand access more broadly.
Physicians note that testosterone given to men without a deficiency suppresses the body's own production, reduces fertility, and raises cardiovascular risk. Urologists interviewed after the announcement observed that Hegseth's video did not mention side effects, the indefinite duration of the treatment, or first-line alternatives such as improved sleep, weight loss, and stress reduction.
The announcement also left a basic question unanswered. Hegseth did not specify whether the more than 231,000 women serving would be screened, though testosterone plays a role in female physiology as well. The Pentagon, asked by multiple outlets for detail, said it had nothing to add beyond the video and a department statement containing similar information.
There is a documented problem underneath the policy. Special operations veterans report a cluster of hormonal and neurological effects — informally called "Operator Syndrome" — serious enough that Congress asked for a briefing on military low-testosterone treatment protocols in the fiscal 2025 defense bill. That population is a narrow subset of a 2.1-millionmember force.
The Women Removed
Since taking office in January 2025, Hegseth has fired or sidelined close to three dozen senior military officers. Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, testified that nearly 60 percent of those removed are women or Black — in a general- and flag-officer corps where women and minorities together account for fewer than 20 percent of the ranks.
Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead the Navy, was fired; Hegseth publicly called her a "DEI hire." Vice Adm. Shoshana Chatfield, the U.S. representative to NATO's Military Committee, was dismissed for what the department described as a loss of confidence in her ability to lead. Vice Adm. Yvette Davids was removed as the first female superintendent of the Naval Academy. Roughly forty officers already cleared for promotion by military review boards have had those promotions blocked; in one Army case, Hegseth struck two Black and two female officers from a one-star list of twenty-nine. Separately, the administration fired Coast Guard commandant Adm. Linda Fagan in January 2025 — outside Hegseth's chain of command, as the Coast Guard falls under the Department of Homeland Security, but part of the same period of senior women exiting service leadership.
The department has generally declined to explain the removals. In the case drawing the most scrutiny — the promotion of Maj. Gen. Antoinette Gant, a combat engineer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan — officials familiar with the exchange told the New York Times that a Hegseth aide conveyed that the President would not want to appear alongside a Black female officer at ceremonial events.
Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell has rejected such reporting as "fake news," stating that promotions go to those who have earned them. The department's position is that its personnel decisions are apolitical and that prior diversity initiatives weakened cohesion.
The measurable outcome: no female four-star officers currently serve on active duty, and none are pending appointment to three- or four-star rank. Concern has been bipartisan. The House Armed Services Committee adopted a provision requiring the department to tell Congress why senior officers were dismissed.
The Men Discharged
Executive Order 14183, "Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness," signed January 27, 2025, directed the separation of transgender service members. It asserted that adopting a gender identity inconsistent with one's sex conflicts with the honorable and disciplined lifestyle required of a soldier. Hegseth's implementing memo that May stated that expressing what it called a false gender identity cannot satisfy the standards necessary for service.
According to the Pentagon, 4,240 troops carried a gender dysphoria diagnosis — the condition the department selected as its identifying criterion, though the two are not equivalent, since not every transgender person has it. Roughly 1,000 entered voluntary separation. Several service members later told Military Times they had accepted the diagnosis primarily because it was the only administrative route to gender-affirming care.
Separations carried lasting administrative marks. Military.com, citing Pentagon confirmation, reported that enlisted transgender troops were separated under the code JFF, indicating discharge under the authority of the service's top civilian official, while officers received the code JDK — a code the outlet reported labels them a national security threat. Col. Bree Fram, a Space Force astronautical engineer, said her understanding was that the code had last been used to discharge gay service members during the McCarthy-era Lavender Scare. A defense official offered no explanation for either code, but said the enlisted code had nothing to do with clearance eligibility; the official did not address the officer code. Affected troops said their concern was the effect on security clearances in future federal or contractor work.
The policy remains in litigation. A district court issued a nationwide injunction in March 2025; the Supreme Court lifted it that May, letting the ban take effect. On June 1, 2026, the D.C. Circuit ruled the ban unlawful — but only for the named plaintiffs, leaving other transgender service members subject to separation. In early July the district court certified the case as a class action. The Justice Department has said it will petition the Supreme Court and moved to keep relief from taking effect meanwhile. The matter is unresolved.
The Mechanism
In May 2025, days after the implementing memo, a senior defense official told reporters that the services would rely on commanders and on annual medical screenings to identify transgender troops who had not come forward.
That is the same annual periodic health assessment into which testosterone screening will now be inserted.
The instrument is constant across both policies. What changes is its function. In 2025 the annual physical operated as a search — a means of locating service members whose medical records marked them for removal. In 2026 the same physical operates as a benefit, a delivery point for hormone therapy framed as an investment in readiness. The department has not addressed the reuse, and no public record indicates the two decisions were connected. But the assessment now serves as both the department's screening tool for capability and, fourteen months earlier, its tool for identifying who would be separated.
The Finding
The physiological overlap has been noted elsewhere. The Advocate reported this week that the Pentagon is expanding access to the same class of hormone treatment the administration characterized as an unnecessary expense when transgender troops received it. Transgender men undergoing hormone therapy take testosterone, and it produces measurable gains in muscle mass and strength — the anabolic effect the department now cites as a readiness benefit.
Placed beside the personnel record, that overlap is one instance of a broader pattern. Hegseth's stated standard, from his February 2025 memo, is a single force without subgroups defined by anything other than ability or mission adherence. Measured against three actions taken under that standard, the criteria do not hold constant: For men in the general force, testosterone is a capability to be screened for and supplied. For transgender men, the same hormone accompanied separation and, by the administration's own budget argument, counted as waste. For senior women with extensive command records, capability does not appear to have been the operative measure at all; the department has largely declined to say what was.
The Pentagon maintains each action rests on readiness and merit assessed without regard to identity. What the combined record shows is a definition of fitness to serve that has varied by group — treated as something to build in one population, something disqualifying in another, and something left unstated in a third — administered, in two of the three cases, through the same annual exam. Whether that reflects a coherent policy is the question the department has not answered, and the one Congress and the courts are now pressing.
This is a news investigation. The author's commentary on it appears separately, labeled opinion.