There Are Many Good Reasons To Criticize Kristi Noem. Her Husband's Sexual Interests Are Not Among Them. |
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There Are Many Good Reasons To Criticize Kristi Noem. Her Husband's Sexual Interests Are Not Among Them.
Who cares if Bryon Noem likes pretending to have giant breasts?
Elizabeth Nolan Brown | 4.1.2026 12:26 PM
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(Credit: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Newscom)
There's something unseemly going on with Kristi Noem's husband—and it's not the giant, fake balloon breasts.
Bryon Noem, longtime spouse of former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, was just outed by the Daily Mail as a kinkster with a fondness for bimbofication (fantasies in which women undergo extreme transformations into cartoonish sex symbols) and perhaps autogynephilia (in which men are turned on by the thought of themselves as women).
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How should we feel about this? Maybe firstly, like someone in the writer's room of this farce we call 2026 has gotten bored.
War? Done that. DoorDash discourse? Done that. Armed federal agents shooting citizens for protesting cruel immigration policies? We've aired that episode at least twice already! But wait—what if the husband of the woman presiding over those extrajudicial killings dressed himself up with comically uneven fake nipples and a duck face pout and sent those photos to sex workers? Now that's sure to get ratings….
I don't mean to sound callous about the killings and other atrocities carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers under his wife's direction. It's precisely those things—the shock and horror of them, the cruelty and unaccountability—that make me extra wary of the Bryon Noem fetish-photos news cycle. There is plenty of legitimate fodder for criticism in Kristi Noem's record. No one needs to go digging into her husband's sex life for fuel.
And, in fact, doing so could actually detract from criticism of Kristi Noem's record, giving her and her supporters room to dismiss political opponents as part of a cruel and personal campaign against her family.
I also feel bad for the Noems' children and grandchildren. And, yes, for Bryon Noem—even if he was reckless, and even if he has other things to answer for. ("At least he did this on his own dime and without shooting protesters in the face," comments Nick Gillespie.)
Being married to a public figure shouldn't automatically make your sex life fair game. And the Mail's attempt to frame this as a national security issue seems like a weak attempt to justify this invasion of privacy.
For those interested in Kristi Noem's husband cross-dressing, I have written deeply about another man's cross-dressing being "discovered." It ended tragically https://t.co/238162wOj5
— Nancy Rommelmann (@NancyRomm) March 31, 2026
Mostly I just think this sort of thing—the Mail's choice to publish this story, the gleeful and mocking way many have been sharing it—is corrosive to us as a society.
Bryon Noem wasn't hurting anyone with his dress-up time and his bimbofication chats. In fact, he was, per the Mail, paying some sex workers thousands of dollars. He's not out there campaigning against sex work and being a hypocrite.
We gain nothing from the knowledge of his antics but a bit of fun at someone else's expense—and at the expense of values like tolerance and respect for privacy.
A lot of people are weirded out by Bryon Noem's........