In the sitcom “M*A*S*H,” Cpl. Maxwell Klinger was so desperate to escape his assignment to a mobile army surgical hospital during the Korean War that he dressed as a woman in an attempt to prove he was mentally unfit to serve.
At the time, it was accepted that people who suffered from what is now called “gender dysphoria” weren’t suited for military duty. But in today’s military, Klinger would be considered “transgender” or “gender-nonconforming” and would be accepted openly without fear of dismissal.
That’s been the case for pediatrician Rachel Levine, a man who identifies as a woman. In 2021, Levine was named President Joe Biden’s assistant secretary for health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Levine began wearing a skirted military uniform after being ceremonially sworn in as a four-star admiral. That makes Levine the highest-ranking official in the U.S. Public Health Services Commissioned Corps. But that doesn’t change what one former Army neuropsychologist considers to be serious issues with allowing those with gender dysphoria into the military.
Transgender soldiers taking hormones are more likely to suffer from mood swings and health problems, making them a higher mission risk when deployed, according to Alan Hopewell, a neuropsychologist in Fort Worth, Texas. The effects of medication taken by “sexually confused individuals” on military induction and retention could be significant, Hopewell told The Epoch Times.
“Nobody has addressed the medication issue,” he said.
Department of Defense officials didn’t respond by press time to a request for comment about whether the effects of transgender treatments on soldiers had been studied.
A large Danish transgender suicide and mortality study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on June 27 showed that transgender individuals had “significantly higher rates of suicide attempt, suicide mortality, suicide-unrelated mortality, and all-cause mortality compared with the non-transgender population.”
Fit to Serve?
Hopewell was asked to write about the issue for Combat Stress magazine. He is a retired U.S. Army major, and he was awarded the Bronze Star as a prescribing psychologist in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Under the Biden administration, the U.S. Army changed its rules in 2021 to allow those with gender dysphoria—confusion and distress over biological sex—to serve.
Gender identity would “no longer be a basis for involuntary separation or military discharge, denied reenlistment or continuation of service, or subjected to adverse action or mistreatment,” according to an explanation of the policy changes on the U.S. Army website.
As a neuropsychologist able to write prescriptions, Hopewell spent much of his career determining whether soldiers were fit to serve in the Army. While the military is allowing transgender personnel, it appears no studies have been done on how the prescription drugs that are needed to maintain a “gender transition” may affect combat readiness, he said.
As a general rule, Army soldiers who need more sophisticated health monitoring can’t be deployed on a mission to a place where medical access is limited, he said. Army policy requires deployed soldiers to be treatable by a general practitioner because specialized care isn’t available in places such as Iraq, where he served, he said.
Hopewell pointed to testimony from transgender patients before the Texas Legislature this spring—one testified that receiving care from anyone other than an endocrinologist was difficult.
Medications that transgender patients need could even cause health and mental problems, he said. Testosterone, the male hormone used to help women appear more masculine, has been connected to sudden outbursts of intense anger termed “roid rage.”
Transgender patients take “massive” doses of testosterone or estrogen, which disrupt brain function and the entire physical system of the body, he said.
“There are substantial issues” that likely affect transgender people who join the military, Hopewell said.
“I’m not saying that nobody [transgender] could serve. But we have to recognize that this is a very complicated, serious issue and many of these people aren’t going to be able to be retained.”
Challenging, Expensive Medical Needs
And even if they are allowed to serve, it could take significant medical resources to deal with transgender medical needs, he said.
High doses of hormones have contributed to erratic behavior exhibited by some gender dysphoric people, he said, and Army medics aren’t equipped to deal with such issues in the field. But some military officials, such as Coast Guard Capt. Jay Caputo, have dismissed medication concerns surrounding transgender soldiers.
Hormone treatment for transgender soldiers is no different from birth control pills for female soldiers, Caputo wrote in a December 2017 article published by the U.S. Naval Institute magazine.
“Military members deploy worldwide every day while taking the same medications transgender persons use, just for different reasons,” Caputo wrote. “While the situation is not ideal, it would not limit a person’s ability to perform their duties.”
Caputo, a transgender service member who has served openly since June 2017, chalked up resistance to transgender soldiers to “transphobia.”
“Many do not understand what it means to be transgender,” Caputo wrote. “They think it is a mental illness (it is not). They think it is a choice (it is not). They think the costs are exorbitant (they are not). They worry transgender persons will flood into the military for a taxpayer-funded sex change (not realistic). Once the myths are debunked and the facts established, what is left?”
Hopewell, who treated people with gender dysphoria decades ago, disagrees. Patients he saw in the 1970s while working at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston struggled with mental illness, he said.
Transgender patients often have other mental issues, such as depression and anxiety, Hopewell said, and giving hormones to a person already under mental stress could produce adverse outcomes. Testosterone abuse in weightlifting and bodybuilding circles brought attention to the issue when a law against steroid use was passed in 1990.
As Caputo pointed out, critics of allowing transgender people to serve in the military have speculated that many join for free sex-change operations and hormones and that that would burden the health care system for the military.
The U.S. Department of Defense spent $11.6 million on psychotherapy for service members with gender dysphoria from Jan. 1, 2016, to May 14, 2021, according to Military.com. Within the department, 637 service members received hormone therapy for gender dysphoria during the same time at a cost of $340,000. And there were 243 “gender-transition” surgeries, performed at a cost of $3.1 million.
The Pentagon’s total annual medical budget for health care programs in 2016 was $33.5 billion. The proposed budget for fiscal 2022 called for $35.6 billion in discretionary spending for health care, according to the website, which is run by a private company that tracks news on all branches of the U.S. military.
Gender-Altering Care for Veterans
The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) also appears poised to cover gender transition surgery under a new policy being reviewed by VA Secretary Denis McDonough. But resistance to the policy change is building.
In June, the Congressional House Appropriations Committee crafted a budget prohibiting the use of federal dollars for gender-transition hormones and surgeries at VA facilities.
It would be hard to prove that gender-confused people sign up for the military to get sex-change operations and treatment paid for at taxpayer expense, Hopewell said. Yet once they’re in the military, their ongoing care would be covered under the Veterans Administration, including after discharge.
“So the reality is that we’re going to have a tremendous cohort of people that maybe come in for a year” and get care for a lifetime, he said.
Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
