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You are here: Home / Politics / America / Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services Rachel Levine, MD Has Been Sworn In as Admiral Levine In the US Public Health Service!

Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services Rachel Levine, MD Has Been Sworn In as Admiral Levine In the US Public Health Service!

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Admiral Levine is now the first four star transgender general officer/flag officer in an of the United States’ uniformed services.

From The Washington Post:

A senior Biden health appointee who made history when she became the nation’s highest-ranking openly transgender official has also become its first openly transgender four-star officer.

Rachel Levine, the U.S. assistant secretary for health,wassworn in Tuesday as an admiral of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, a 6,000-person force that responds to health crises on behalf of the federal government, including administering coronavirus vaccines and delivering care after hurricanes. Levine is also theorganization’s first-ever femalefour-star admiral.

The public health service is one of the nation’s eight uniformed services, although it is distinct from the six military services — including the Navy, Army and Air Force — by explicitly focusing on medical issues. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Commissioned Officer Corps, whose officers command vehicles that probe hurricanes and map the seafloor, is also a uniformed service.

Here are Admiral Levine’s remarks after being sworn in:

Open thread!

Reader Interactions

69Comments

  2. 2.

    geg6

    She’s really great and I’m so happy for her.  I was sad to lose her leadership here in PA mid-pandemic, but this is unequivocally a good thing for her and for the nation.

  3. 3.

    SiubhanDuinne

    This is excellent news! Congratulations to Admiral Levine, and thanks to Adam for front-paging this important milestone.

  4. 4.

    Suzanne

    @geg6: Agreed. I found her communications to be very helpful during the early freakout days. I wish good things for her.

  7. 7.

    Adam L Silverman

    @bbleh: According to the article, Senator Aqua Buddha is already most put out. As is Tom “I buy all my shirts one size two small” Fitton.

  11. 11.

    Dan B

    I’ve known about eight trans women and men, probably more from when the medical care and support were not readily available so they were drag queens or kings. They were all great people, somewhat quirky but self aware. I believe it takes tremendous self and social awareness. Those are attributes this country can benefit from.

  12. 12.

    different-church-lady

    This doesn’t say “open thread” until the fifth tag, and even then it really shouldn’t.

    I’m going to give Adam a decent hour before I start abusing that mistake.

    (DCL, +1 really long continuous one, over a camp fire…)

  18. 18.

    planetjanet

    I read the Washington Post article earlier today, but it still is not clear to me what the distinction is between Assistant Secretary and 4-star Admiral. She had a swearing-in ceremony in March as the Assistant Secretary. Are there additional responsibilities that go with this new status?

  23. 23.

    bbleh

    @Dan B: Cotton? Really? Had no idea.

    Lindsey, duh.  And word Back In The Day was McConnell. But Cotton, huh.  That would kinda put a kink in his presidential plans.

  24. 24.

    pluky

    @planetjanet: They are parallel designations. I have an uncle who was both an HHS undersecretary and a PHS Rear Admiral. The trick is, I think, that the PHS appointment requires appropriate academic credentials. Note the new Admiral is also an MD.

  25. 25.

    HumboldtBlue

    Never a bad thing to hear some positive news.

    The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Commissioned Officer Corps, whose officers command vehicles that probe hurricanes and map the seafloor, is also a uniformed service.

    The things you learn…

  26. 26.

    H.E.Wolf

    Congratulations to Admiral Levine. May her work with the Corps be successful, and may she be an inspiration to many, trans and cis alike.

  27. 27.

    JoyceCB

    Hello, non-American here.  You have EIGHT uniformed services?  Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard… and Public Health and NOAA?  And what else?  Please don’t say Space Force.

  28. 28.

    different-church-lady

    @JoyceCB: Wait ’til you hear how many un-uniformed we have.

    (DCL, +1 really long one over a campfire, + 1 of my own invention, +1 one where I just dumped alcohol into a glass over ice…)

  35. 35.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Dan B: ​
      I have tried three times to link to the Aqua Buddha story for you. Each time, it has disappeared into the ether.

    According to this woman, who requested anonymity because of her current job as a clinical psychologist, “He and Randy came to my house, they knocked on my door, and then they blindfolded me, tied me up, and put me in their car. They took me to their apartment and tried to force me to take bong hits. They’d been smoking pot.” After the woman refused to smoke with them, Paul and his friend put her back in their car and drove to the countryside outside of Waco, where they stopped near a creek. “They told me their god was ‘Aqua Buddha’ and that I needed to bow down and worship him,” the woman recalls. “They blindfolded me and made me bow down to ‘Aqua Buddha’ in the creek. I had to say, ‘I worship you Aqua Buddha, I worship you.’ At Baylor, there were people actively going around trying to save you and we had to go to chapel, so worshiping idols was a big no-no.”

    https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2014/1/27/1272838/-Rand-Paul-and-Aqua-Buddha

  38. 38.

    Ella in New Mexico

    Jesus Fucking Awesome Christ this is so incredible.

    I’m dumbfounded as to how something so incredbly progressive and wonderful like this can happen in the same country who’s “Supreme” Court allowed a state to literally outlaw abortion.

    But I’m still rejoicing.

  42. 42.

    Adam L Silverman

    @JoyceCB: Unfortunately Space Force is the 8th. It shouldn’t be. But from what I can tell no one in the Biden administration wants to waste the political capital, let alone other resources like time on putting it back under the Air Force where it belongs.

  43. 43.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Adam L Silverman:

    According to the article, Senator Aqua Buddha is already most put out. As is Tom “I buy all my shirts one size two small” Fitton.

    I get the Aqua Buddha reference for Rand Paul, but not “I buy all my shirts one size too small” for Fitton. Enlightenment, please?

  44. 44.

    phein62

    Many of the people who work at CDC are commissioned officers in the Public Health Service (which also includes [or included] the Indian Health Services, NIH, and the FDA), and they all have to wear the uniform one day a week, or at least they did back in the 1990’s when I was auditing their facilities.  I felt like I was having flashbacks when my POCs would show up in these Navy-looking uniforms, and it turned out they were admirals of one rank or another.  Talk about your dedicated people, though.  They could all have made bank in the world, but stayed out of a sense of duty — or maybe for the cool uni’s.

  46. 46.

    Adam L Silverman

    Now that my workout is done and the dogs are walked. Time to make something to eat and then, once that has been inhaled, shower.

  47. 47.

    Adam L Silverman

    @SiubhanDuinne: Fitton likes to show off the size of his upper arms. So he buys his polo and dress shirts one size too small. Frankly, as someone with upper arms that have an 18 plus inch circumference, a 54 inch chest circumference, a 64 inch circumference around my shoulders, and a 19 inch neck, this would be very uncomfortable. Even with polo shirts that are made from somewhat stretchy moisture wicking material. But I’m not trying to impress whomever Fitton is trying to impress when he tweets out videos of himself being indignant and asking for donations, so…

  50. 50.

    Mike in NC

    Trump’s hate war against transgender people, Muslims, and non-whites was his main feature to appeal to the deplorables.

  58. 58.

    Mike in NC

    I used to regularly visit the uniform shop at the Navy Exchange at what was then Naval Hospital Bethesda (1990s) and marveled at the many overweight, long haired personnel in sloppy uniforms who were obviously in the Public Health Service.

  59. 59.

    Sister Golden Bear

    Mabel tov Dr. Admiral Levine! (Or is it Admiral Dr. Levine? Or perhaps Dr. Mrs. The Admiral? /s )

    And yes it will lots of wingnut heads explode even more. She’s had to handle an unbelievable amount of shit from them, going back to her days as a state official, and has she’s handled it with grace and professionalism.

  60. 60.

    Ken

    @Adam L Silverman: Unfortunately Space Force is the 8th. It shouldn’t be.

    Privatize it. Let Bezos, Musk, and whatever other billionaires are building their own nearly-orbital vehicles bid for it.

  61. 61.

    Leto

    @Bill Arnold: so just from the pic, the male uniform model’s pants are out of reg. Great way to start. That’s not even mentioning that the PT uniforms are a direct copy of the AF ones (they’re shit; they don’t wick sweat, they’re abso-fucking-lutely balls hot in any type of warm weather, and they’re ill fitting), and that the dress uniform… well, they’re shit looking too. I’ll never consider them a service. I guess I’m in that Army camp now (“The AF should be back with the Army, get off my lawn!”)

  63. 63.

    Another Scott

    Health related – ScienceMag:

    When it comes to how long a mammal can live, a bigger body is usually better: The typical mouse life span is less than 4 years, whereas a bowhead whale may make it to 211. But within a species, this relationship can flip: Large dog breeds tend to have shorter life spans than smaller canines.

    Now, a massive analysis of chemical marks spread along the genomes of about 200 mammalian species has hinted at a novel explanation for this canine curiosity—and yielded a bounty of data for understanding mammalian differences in life span, average weight, and other traits.

    The analysis looked at a DNA modification called methylation, which can control whether genes are turned on or off. The patterns of methylation the team found add a new layer of information to better understood differences in the DNA sequences of genes themselves, the authors say. “It’s kind of a gold mine for people who either want to study what is unique about a certain species or conversely what is shared,” says aging researcher Steve Horvath of the University of California, Los Angeles, who leads a team that described the methylation results this week online at the annual meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG).

    […]

    Methylation is one of several so-called epigenetic marks, referring to changes in DNA or its protein packaging that influence how genes are expressed without altering the heritable sequence of bases that make up DNA. In DNA methylation, a molecule called a methyl group attaches to a base, usually cytosine. Horvath is known for showing that patterns of these methyl groups change as a person ages, and for creating an “epigenetic clock” that uses a DNA sample to estimate a person’s age within 3.6 years.

    In a new project, Horvath teamed up with more than 100 other labs to look at these epigenetic marks across mammalian species. The Mammalian Methylation Consortium gathered thousands of blood and other tissue samples from more than 200 mammals, from shrews to elephants, and scanned their DNA using a chip that looks for the presence of a methyl group at about 36,000 cytosines along stretches of DNA shared across mammals. They used the data to devise an epigenetic clock that can be used to estimate the age of any living mammal from a DNA sample. This clock turned up some new genes that may govern aging, first author Ake Lu reports in a poster at the ASHG meeting this week and a January preprint.

    […]

    The pace of understanding the molecular chemistry of our bodies is quite astounding these days.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  64. 64.

    Adam L Silverman

    @zhena gogolia: Like I said, the first movie was fine. The second movie was okay. The third movie, which was a studio requirement on Jackson, is the real stretch in regard to the actual book.

  65. 65.

    UncleEbeneezer

    Wonderful!  Especially in light of the fuckshit that placed like Texas are doing to target Trans people.

  66. 66.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Another Scott:

    The Mammalian Methylation Consortium

    By next week they’ll have a SuperPAC and a group of lobbyists doing a fundraiser for Manchin and Sinema to block something they don’t like from being in the reconciliation bill.

    And I wish I could use sarc tags.

  67. 67.

    Adam L Silverman

    @Zoso: Just so you know, when I got the moderation alert for your comment, I saw what was originally written in response to me. If it had still been there when I got back to my computer to approve it, I would have both moved it to the trash and put you on the blacklist. That shit doesn’t fly here. Remember that if you intend to stick around.

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