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Donald Trump Says US Military Will Not Allow Transgender People To Serve (theguardian.com)
Donald Trump said on Wednesday he would not allow transgender individuals to serve in the US military in any capacity. From a report: The US president tweeted: "After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow ... transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military." He added: "Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming ... victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail." Trump's decision marks a sharp reversal of a policy initiated under Barack Obama, in which the Pentagon ended a longtime ban on transgender people from serving openly in the military. As a candidate, Trump cast himself as a supporter of LGBT rights and indicated he would uphold certain Obama-era policies designed to protect transgender people.
Full body shiver.
If a soldier has to take Hormone replacement pills every day, and then they are suddenly unavailable, I could see it causing some issues.
Sorry, Trump... that genie is already out of the bottle. Legislation is probably necessary to roll it back at this point.
My feeling is this is bound to wind up in the 9th circuit district court with an injunctive order issued against this change in policy.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl...
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
I personally know a former Marine. He loved serving. He was an NCO, a sargeant. He's one of these disciplined and athletic guys who actually likes all the running and training. He spoke so fondly of it that I asked him why he would have left. He told me that the political correctness was just becoming ridiculous. The female Marines just didn't have the physical performance capabilities of the males (the best among them were about equal to the average male, and those were exceptional) - this is the same reason sports and the Olympics have Men's and Women's events. It's just the nature of the sexes and beyond our control. The top brass kept trying to ignore these differences, to the point that it was harming combat effectiveness in many situations. Of course, in a military environment you do what you're told and you shut your mouth about it, so he and other NCOs had no voice and no ability to protest. Eventually he got tired of it so when his term of service was up, he got out. He told me he was not the only one, not by far. Politics was not why he signed up.
People already generally have a hard time being rational about real, measurable physical strength/performance differences between men and women. And those can easily be demonstrated and proven. The whole LGBT topic tends to cause even more extreme irrational reactions and controversy. You really don't want this kind of bickering in a military unit where distractions and small mistakes get people killed. It's the one place you can't afford it.
There's plenty of things Trump has said and done that I don't like. This time though, I think he's making the right call and probably knows he's going to take a lot of outrage for it. I can respect that whether I like the guy or not.
Don't belong in the Military. They have a job to do.
From the healthcare vote going on right now. Worked too. This crap is now front page on CNN while our Congress Critters are dealing in the back.
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There are two reasons for this:
* Physiological - There's enough issues with men and women serving together in high stress situations. This would be another distraction.
* Political - Just like his attacks on his attorney general this is a distraction from the fact that the Republicans could not get Repeal and/or Replace of ObamaCare through again.
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
He is commander in chief.
Yup, and I think that's what causes most people to "full body shiver" :
phrasings such as "my generals" make painfully aware that your orange troll with a twitter account *is* "the commander in chief" and "*his* generals" are indeed under *his* command.
sad~
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
You want to know why Trump one?
I suspect it is because there are people who aren't intelligent enough to know how to spell "won", a three-letter word?
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Girly? More like grizzly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Even accepting your so-called logic, and further even accepting that US enemies are "not afraid of girly men", there would not be any way in practice to notice any so-called "girliness", because at least generally speaking, the soldiers of opposing sides do not routinely socialize with eachother enough to know them well enough to associate such traits to them. There is no objective standard by which anyone can say that your notion is acceptable... I can't even call it an argument, it is so abysmally flawed.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Modern sensibilities? By not giving in to people with a mental disorder and not allowing them to enter the army
It hasn't been considered a mental disorder by the sciences for decades. However, to humor you, so what if it is? What would the harm be?
Do you prevent people with high-functioning autism in the army? Do you think people with minor anxiety are prevent from joining? What about ADD? Get PTSD you should be kicked out?
Even if were a mental disorder- it's far less harmful than any of the above, and the above won't get you barred from the military.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Amen!
We need to disallow gays in the military also. It's important that our enemies fear our military and they are not afraid of a bunch of girly men.
By the way, the Spartans (well, actually the Sacred Band of Thebes) were gay, a fact conveniently left out of the movie "300". And they were quite feared on the battlefield for a number of decades.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik...
Can 0.3-0.6% of the population really do anything "in droves"?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I was rejected for mild scoliosis....I would think being born with the wrong genitals would be a more severe condition than that. I require no treatment and rarely ever even feel discomfort...compared to someone who will require treatment for the rest of their lives.
The purpose of the military, is to break things and kill people. It needs to be a tight cohesive bunch, not with a bunch of "my gender of the week" types.
I don't know why you think someone having a different gender identity than their assigned at birth identity somehow must make them "weak." Heck, for that matter, even if you did have someone whose gender identity changed every week as you suggest, I don't see why that would them have trouble killing people or being part of a cohesive fighting force.
The military should be EXEMPT from all of this political correctness garbage, which, is set up on purpose, to reduce morality, and destroy the best fighting force in the world.
Or this is about people who genuinely want the right to fight for their country. You appear to be jumping from the fact that you disagree with other people to concluding that they must have nefarious goals. Incidentally, it is worth noting that the exact same arguments you are making now have now been made twice before. They were first made when we desegregated the military to have black and white people in the same units. This argument was again made only a few years ago when we let gays and lesbians openly serve. Why is it different this time?
This first time I've seen the appropriate use of an Anonymous Coward account on Slashdot in ~17 years.
The purpose of the military, is to break things and kill people. It needs to be a tight cohesive bunch, not with a bunch of "my gender of the week" types. The military should be EXEMPT from all of this political correctness garbage, which, is set up on purpose, to reduce morality, and destroy the best fighting force in the world. (I have thick skin /. types, fire away)
You don't have a thick skin if your hang-ups about other people's bodies requires everyone who is not like you to have their rights restricted. You are the most delicate snowflake of all.
It's your attitude that needs to be drummed out of the service. It smacks of poor discipline and a fragile psyche.
Good job dehumanizing people that you don't agree with.
"Modern sensibilities" is just a way of referring to the preferences of a small minority of self-appointed elite moralists. It can never make intuitive sense because if it did, the elite club wouldn't be special. For the same reason, it can never be a majority -- if it ever becomes a majority, they shift it so they're special again. They always need to know they're better than you.
FWIW, if you are on stimulant therapy for ADD, they will not allow you to enlist. But if you can get by without meds, they're happy to take you. (There is no indication that transgendered people are unable to function without hormone therapy, they should be able to serve.)
So if I can point out a non-trans person who broke the law, does that mean that cis-gendered people shouldn't be allowed to serve either?
Dr. Paul R. McHugh, the former psychiatrist-in-chief for Johns Hopkins Hospital and its current Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry, said that transgenderism is a “mental disorder” that merits treatment, that sex change is “biologically impossible,” and that people who promote sexual reassignment surgery are collaborating with and promoting a mental disorder.
(2015, not decades ago)
A german study (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12832250) results state "In 270 (75%) of these 359 patients, cross-gender identification was interpreted as an epiphenomenon of other psychiatric illnesses, notably personality, mood, dissociative, and psychotic disorders. Major mood disorders, dissociative disorders and psychotic disorders reported in 79% of transgenders."
(2003, not decades ago)
Even if you argue that transgenderism isn't in itself a mental disorder, a transgender individual is far more likely to have multiple other mental disorders, a much higher risk of suicide, etc. It then becomes fair to say that if you are transgender, you personally might be mentally stable enough to be in the military but there is a very high statistical chance that you are nuts in ways that are prohibitively not conducive to the purpose of the military and the stresses that occur due to that purpose.
And the DSM is referring to Gender Identity Variants Disorder as a "A marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender"
It now refers to Gender Identity Disorder as the mental stress created by GIV.
Yes, it's a mental disorder.
pretty sure the central claim of being a tranny is that they can't function without special treatment
How is this in any way relevant for a tech site?
Amen!
We need to disallow gays in the military also. It's important that our enemies fear our military and they are not afraid of a bunch of girly men.
The US military should make their uniforms as girly as possible. Imagine the humiliation of having your ass handed to you by a bunch of guys in pink taffeta
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
A hefty percentage of the population knows somebody in the 0.3-0.6% and may no longer wish to serve a military which casts out their friends/family.
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You don't think you can be medically discharged for an inability to perform duties for _any_ reason in the Military? You don't know jack about the Military. I'm a US Army vet, and have zero problems with this ruling but not simply because of the medication. I'll give two easy examples.
First, as GP stated above, the Military has to be a very cohesive bunch. In back line situations you have communal showers and bathrooms with little privacy. In front line situations, you have a canteen and hole that you dig. You put the majority of the military at a very compromising position with transgender soldiers. The twig and berries don't vanish because a person believes they are a woman, any more than breasts and bush vanish when a women believes they are man. So should the women in the military be forced to look at a twig and berries in the showers? Do you think it's fair to the men to stick a naked women who thinks they are man into a shower with them? Not that people want things to happen in either of those circumstances, but you are providing a very high risk and completely unnecessary situation for soldiers.
Next, you have PT rules by gender because _biology_ differences give us different limitations and abilities. The military loses effectiveness due to some of those differences already but has learned to cope. What they can't cope with is a completely arbitrary set of restrictions for every potential soldier. How do you cope with a guy who claims to be a woman? Do they get to do PT based on woman's rules or men's rules? Can the woman be medically discharged because the believe they are a man but can't do 80 pushups in under 2 minutes? Don't you believe more and more soldiers would not just try to drop out medically, but claim to be a more convenient gender for things like PT testing and promotion consideration?
The Military is not about "me", it's about "the force". Since we do not force service people who want "me" don't have to serve.
For the person who claimed not all jobs in the Military are combat, I say bullshit! Every soldier is trained on how to kill the enemy and defend against attacks. Even if your job isn't going out on patrol looking for enemies, you are at risk simply by being a soldier. Your first job and first responsibility in the Military is to be a Soldier. Your secondary job is to be a medic, mechanic, etc... (See Jessica Lynch, or any of the other people attacked, wounded, killed, or captured away from the front lines.)
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
That is a misconception. The central claim of being transgendered is simply that they do not internally identify with their gender phenotype. Gender Dysphoric Disorder is a condition indicating that the situation has a significant negative impact on their emotional state. Not all transgendered people have this, and many that do are able to serve flawlessly regardless. If a person is unable to serve then by all means, they shouldn't. But there is no reason to exclude all trans people.
If this "male" then becomes pregnant
You realize that MtF transgendered people stop ovulating due to hormone treatments, right?
And how do the females respond to a "female" that is using the communal showers?
So soldiers are such delicate flowers that they can not handle seeing genitalia? If that's the case, we've got much, much larger problems than showers.
It's basically a non-issue.
http://www.rand.org/content/da...
The NIH called the paper you cite by Dr. Hugh "pure balderdash".
And that other study you cite was Dutch, not German. It was based on DSM-IV, which is outdated. The diagnostic criteria presented in that study is outdated; it had cause and effect backwards.
The large majority of jobs in the U.S. armed forces are not fighting or even physical roles.
A great-uncle, a WW2 paratrooper, shared his frozen hole in the ground on the font lines of Bastogne with a truck driver who had not fired a weapon since basic training.
Another great-uncle, brother of the previous, was a clerk aboard a Navy destroyer in the Pacific during WW2. His primary job involving logs, ledgers and typewriters but during combat these were put aside and his secondary job came into play, anti-aircraft gun crew member. His tertiary job was Browning Automatic Rifleman (he did well in Basic Training on the rifle range) in the event of guarding prisoners, repelling boarders, or shore party. "Shore party" in this context being when the Navy is a bit short of Marines at a particular place and time and tells Sailors to pick up a rifle and engage in ground combat. Sort of like the previously mentioned Army truck driver. His tertiary job only came into play in the context of covering crew members as they were fishing enemy sailors/pilots out of the sea. Some of these tried to pull a gun or knife to take one last American with them.
A high school teacher was an electronics technician in the Marine Corp and served in Vietnam. One day he was sitting at his workbench at a comfy base in the rear and his lieutenant appears and tells him that a Marine Force Recon team was taking him behind enemy lines to the Ho Chi Minh Trail in order to install sensors that would detect the movement of enemy reinforcements and supplies on that trail.
In recent wars is there any shortage of stories of troops in non-fighting roles finding themselves in a firefight while driving from point A to point B?
Exactly how does demonstrating some tolerance for transgender individuals go against the 'needs' of the rest of Americans? It does not affect them at all.
I know several LGBTQs because a good friend is. Every one got relentlessly bullied growing up. Often by people in positions of power (teachers, principals, police). Most had parents that were unsupportive. The lucky ones were ignored by their parents. The less lucky received a constant stream of emotional abuse and for the really unlucky ones it as physical abused.
What I'm saying is, in the environment our society has created for them, not shit they got some issues. The correct response isn't to shit on them by denying them one of the few economic opportunities they might have (and make no mistake, our military is a giant socialism program meant to prop up our economy in the face of mind boggling wealth inequality. If you doubt me go read what Eisenhower had to say about the MIC). The correct response is to stop dumping on them non-stop.
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That Trump's ban on transgendered people in the military is a blessing for pacifists! They will only need to declare being transgendered (most possibly, pre-op) to avoid draft. How would the army verify that you are not transgender?