Sara Button
Audio By Carbonatix
Before this week, we’d never paid much attention to Congressman Ronny Jackson.
The staunch Republican offices in Amarillo, and we don’t pay much attention to Amarillo. No offense, Amarillo. We started looking into Jackson this week, though, after he made some less-than-kind comments during a broadcast of Newsmax (the conservative broadcast channel that may be described as right-wing depending on who you ask) about transgender people.
Jackson appeared on Newsmax Tuesday night and proposed that transgender people should be institutionalized en masse because they possess an “underlying level of aggressiveness” that poses a threat to the general public. He also referred to identifying as transgender as “a cancer that’s spreading across this country.”
The comments came amid a discussion on the assassination of the conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, which some Republicans have used as an opportunity to ramp up anti-trans rhetoric because the alleged shooter has a roommate who is in the process of transitioning from male to female. While the FBI has not stated the accused shooter’s motive in the killing, Kirk was an outspoken champion of the anti-transgender movement.
The reality is that transgender people have a mental illness called “Gender Dysphoria” and the Democrats have TAKEN ADVANTAGE of them.
These people were fed lies by the far left and the liberal media leading them to believe they are victims, and made us out to be their… pic.twitter.com/dujEumGN99
— Ronny Jackson (@RonnyJacksonTX) September 17, 2025
During the broadcast, Jackson was asked by the show’s host, Rob Finnerty, about what “warning signs” were missed in the accused shooter, Tyler Robinson, who Finnerty believes went from being a “fairly normal 20-year-old to a totally radicalized 22-year-old left-wing assassin with a trans boyfriend.” (In the industry, this is what we call a loaded question.)
“The underlying reality is that these people have psychiatric illnesses to start with. I mean, when I say these people, I’m talking about the people that are responsible for this, either transgender or associated with the transgender community,” Jackson responded.
The congressman added that he believes “gender dysphoria” to be a real “psychiatric issue,” which is why transgender-identifying people are barred from joining the military, as anyone else who had any other psychiatric issue would be.” A ban on transgender people from enlisting in the armed forces was one of the first executive orders issued by President Donald Trump when he took office earlier this year.
When asked by Finnerty whether he would support increased funding for mental institutions that serve transgender people, Jackson said, “Absolutely.”
The majority of medical associations in the United States state that being transgender is not a mental health disorder. As a trained medical doctor who served as physician to the president under both Obama and Trump, Jackson, of course, knows this. (Although this is the doctor who said “if [Trump] had a healthier diet over the last 20 years, he might live to be 200 years old,” and opposed mask mandates during the COVID-19 pandemic, so it is possible that his medical expertise is not as impressive as one might assume.)
A Reuters fact check states that the majority of mass shootings in the U.S. are carried out by cisgender men, not transgender or non-binary individuals. According to Politifact, there is no evidence that “trans terrorism” is on the rise in the U.S., and that it is ” far-right extremism – not LGBTQ+ violence” that is increasing in frequency.
Still, anti-trans rhetoric seems to flourish nearly every time there is a shooting in the U.S.
While being interviewed on Capitol Hill earlier this week, congressional Republican Nancy Mace accused transgender Americans of being the “most egregious, most vile, violent people on earth.” She then put out a call similar to Jackson’s.
“They are mentally ill and should be put in a straitjacket with a hard steel lock on it,” Mace said.
As the Newsmax interview drew to a close, Jackson accused Democrats of facilitating transgender violence and called on Congress to act.
“We have to do something about this. We have to treat these people. 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,” Jackson said. “I’m all about free speech, but this is a virus. This is a cancer that’s spreading across this country.”
