Trump (on Twitter) bans trans personnel from US Military

Welcome to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell 2.0: Trans Edition.

President Trump announced on Wednesday that the United States will no longer “accept or allow” transgender people in the United States military, saying American forces “must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory” and could not afford to accommodate them.

Mr. Trump made the surprise declaration in a series of posts on Twitter, saying he had come to the decision after talking to generals and military experts, whom he did not name.

[…]

The sweeping policy decision was met with surprise at the Pentagon, outrage from advocacy groups and praise from social conservatives. It reverses the gradual transformation of the military under President Barack Obama, whose administration announced last year that transgender people could serve openly in the military. Mr. Obama’s defense secretary, Ashton B. Carter, also opened all combat roles to women and appointed the first openly gay Army secretary.

As typical of Trump’s Twitter decrees, the affair is an unmitigated debacle. US Military officials hadn’t even heard of the policy change before Trump splattered it over social media; he took so long between tweets that the Pentagon briefly wondered whether he was announcing plans to attack North Korea.

Surveys estimate anywhere from around 4,000 to 15,000 trans troops are currently in the US Military on active duty and in the reserves (no definitive study has yet been conducted) – possibly as many as a fifth of all trans Americans have served at one point in their lives, twice the rate of the general population. Thousands of upstanding troops have just learned from Twitter that their futures have just been upended, for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with their capacity to serve and much more to do with the Trump camp pushing their agenda and hoping to screw with Democrats.

Further, the common argument about the price of military healthcare coverage for trans members is particularly weak – covering trans troops’ needs would cost around $2.4—8.4 million annually (roughly the cost of each of Trump’s golf weekends), whereas the Pentagon already shells out $41 million on Viagra and $84 million on erectile dysfunction drugs for its male troops without anyone complaining about wasteful spending.

Gee, it’s almost like there’s some kind of bigoted double-standard at play. The usual hateful suspects are certainly happy about it all.

So we’re all very clear: there is nothing to lose and everything to gain by allowing trans people to serve openly in the armed forces. Identifying with a different gender than the one on your birth certificate doesn’t interfere with your ability to run, hold a rifle or follow orders. Nor does it suddenly turn other servicemembers around you into unprofessional bigots who’ll refuse to share their barracks with you or fight alongside you in the field. These appeals to some vague threat to “unit cohesion” are are the exact same arguments previously used to exclude gay and lesbian soldiers, and women before them, and Blacks before them, and so on. Whatever else you can say about prejudice, it’s remarkably consistent in the face of reality.

To hammer the point home, here’s the obvious conclusion from the aforelinked RAND Corporation report on the ramifications of allowing trans personnel to serve [my emphasis]:

[…] evidence from foreign militaries and the U.S. military has indicated no significant impact on unit cohesion or operational readiness as a result of allowing transgender and gay and lesbian personnel to serve openly or allowing women to serve in ground combat positions.

What can the U.S. military learn from other countries that permit transgender personnel to serve openly?

At the time of this study, 18 countries allowed transgender military personnel to serve openly: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. […]

• None of the foreign militaries examined reported a negative impact on the operational effectiveness, operational readiness, or cohesion of the force.

The ACLU is already reaching out to anyone affected by the ban. Given their track record with opposing Trump, there’s reason to hope they can get this ban cut down or thrown out.

So much for the great protector of LGBTQ rights the media (on both sides) had promised.