A San Diego Navy doctor was removed from command last week after right wing activists began sharing screenshots of her LinkedIn account on X.
Cmdr. Janelle Marra is a Navy physician with 21 years of service. According to her Navy biography, she’s spent most of her career in the San Diego area, splitting time between San Diego Naval Medical Center and Camp Pendleton.
On her LinkedIn account, Marra lists she/her pronouns and her bio says she’s the “Navy deputy medical director for transgender healthcare.”
Libs of Tiktok, an account on X that shares anti-LGBTQ+ conspiracies, tagged Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth when she quote-tweeted a screenshot of the account saying, “Yikes” and asking Hegseth to “look into this.”
That evening, Hegseth in turn quote-tweeted Libs of Tiktok writing, “Pronouns UPDATED: She/Her/Fired.”
A Navy official with knowledge of the matter told KPBS Hegseth ordered Marra be fired. The official, who is not authorized to comment publicly on the case, said the official cause for Marra’s removal was “a loss of trust and confidence in her ability to command,” which is boilerplate rationale used by the Navy to justify all manner of firings.
Marra’s social media use is now under investigation, the official said.
Marra did not respond to a request for comment.
The upside to all of this right-wing censorship is that every time they do it they sell a bit of their claim to being subversive rebels pushing against a stodgy set of norms around speech and independence. Which, like, is a large part of what they’ve built their base on.
We’re quickly getting back to that 90s era status quo of the right being whining church groups who don’t want to see anyone gay on TV or hear anyone say things that they don’t like politically. The result being that the left gets to look cool and subversive again, which swings the pendulum toward our side.
The biggest strategic mistake we ever made on the left was coming off as scolding moral purists. This is an opportunity to walk that back, and to reframe the push for our rights as rebellion. “I don’t care what you think, I’m doing what I want” is a much stronger position than “let me tell you why what you say and do is immoral”.