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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.
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.
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
I can speak further about this because I was discharged from the Army for having a condition called Congenital Stationary Night Blindness. The way the military works is that no matter what job you have, combat or not, you still have to have a wartime duty, which applies to ANY military occupation. For example, the Army (music) band functions as enemy POW prison guards during time of war. All service members, including cooks, are expected to be able to fire weapons and throw grenades, because every single one of them are expected to be either in or very close to the combat zone.
In my particular case, the logic is that if I was out in the combat zone (my MOS was 19D) or anywhere near it, and night came around, I would be ineffective and would end up being a liability to my battle buddies. Sure, there are night vision goggles, but what if they are damaged, batteries run out, etc? Doesn't work, hence discharge.
In the case of a transgender, if the combat situation caused them to ever separated from their unit for a long period of time (something that happens often) they'd become a liability to their battle buddies. MtF trans would also have to carry other gear around if they've had bottom surgery, which also presents a logistical problem.
At least, this applies to the Army, the same would definitely apply to the Marines, so those two would be right out. It would also likely apply to the Navy as well since they are out at sea for years at a time (definite logistical issues there,) and can and do approach combat zones. Air Force personnel are rarely in the combat zone (except for pilots) but they are typically near the combat zone where they can and do make contact with the enemy.
Furthermore, in any service branch, they don't position you based on your military occupation, rather they position you based on wherever your unit is deployed to, and your unit has many different occupations within it. They aren't going to say "well, our unit can't deploy here because we have a transgender person in it."
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.
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.
The military is already, apparently, the largest employer of transgender people in the USA. This is a political decision, not a practical one. How do we know? The DoD is telling reporters to go talk to the WH about this policy change, AND the Secretary of Defence is currently ON VACATION.
This decision has nothing to do with whether the military can handle it or not; they have been.
but it needs to be at the forefront of equality:
No it needs to be the forefront of lethality. Everything the military does is in service to killing the enemy. The point of Sun Tzu "moral law" isn't that the army needs be moral but to be a "cohesive fighting force" which demonstrably increases the lethality of that fighting force. Everything is secondary to killing the enemy.