Wednesday, July 26, 2017

Donald Trump bans transgender Americans from serving in the military

President Donald Trump. 

As you probably know by now Donald Trump has announced on Twitter that transgender Americans can no longer serve in the United States military in any capacity. You can read the tweets below:



This has, predictably, caused a storm of criticism on social media from the usual suspects. They claim that banning transgender soldiers from serving is discriminatory, ignoring the fact that huge swaths of people are already banned from serving in the military even if they want to.

Got a bad knee (which is why I never served)? No service. Got ADHD? No service. Take medicine for depression? No service. Have an IQ under 85? No service. In short there are a whole list of medical reasons why you cannot serve in the United States military. Even things as seemingly irrelevant as height is enough to prevent service. Military.com has an extensive list of all the medical conditions that can keep you from serving.

This isn't discrimination. Being transgender is a medical condition and the military has long stopped people with medical conditions from serving. If they can drop a soldier for having bad allergies or being too short, then they can certainly drop soldiers for having gender dysphoria.

Though not allowing the transgender to serve may seem "mean" there are very valid reasons for the ban. The first one is that the transgender community has a much greater risk of other mental issues that are comorbid with the disorder, including depression and suicide attempts. Around 41% of transgender individuals have attempted suicide. When combined with the already high number of suicides in the military, the risk of suicide is completely unacceptable. Suicide obviously has a major negative impact, not only on the person that attempts or succeeds in committing it, but for everyone around that person as well.

Secondly, there are the obvious logistical nightmare that the transgender cause for military units. Transgender individuals need extensive medical care and treatment, which is a major issue while deployed. I won't go into all the gruesome details but transgender people need drugs and other things to keep healthy and stay as their preferred gender. If they lose access to those things in combat they might have a mental breakdown and in any case those drugs and supplies would take up critical space that would better be used for medicine or ammunition.

Third, there are medical concerns as well, unrelated to mental health. Someone that has transitioned to a different gender and has had surgery is at risk for infection and other things in combat. In short, while a vagina is self cleaning, a pseudo-vagina is not and is, therefore, prone to infection. When in combat conditions overseas the problem would be much worse. This means that transgender people at risk of getting sick or being down for treatment when their unit really needs them.

Fourth, there are the "bathroom" issues with having the transgender serve in the military. No matter how you solve the issue, people are either going to have to take a communal shower with someone of the opposite sex or the opposite gender. This isn't like a normal bathroom where you have a stall for privacy, it's in out in the open. That's going to be damaging to unit cohesion and the mental well being of other soldiers.

I should talk about the political reasons for this ban as well. Many people, myself included, considered the Obama administration's choice to lift the ban in the first place was nothing other than political theater. In short, he was more interested in forcing political correctness on the military than it's actual job of defending the country. It never should have been lifted in the first place.

It's also an easy political victory for Donald Trump. Not only did he just do something that is extremely popular among his base, who hated that Obama lifted the ban, he has completely distracted the media once again. Given that the health care bill seems to have failed in Congress, he needs a distraction right now.

There is a concern that this action will anger the LGBT community who has been slowly coming around to voting for Republicans. I have said in the past that Donald Trump is incredibly pro-LGBT as compared to other Republican candidates and even many democrats. He's in favor of gay marriage, thinks "bathroom laws" are a pointless distraction, and was extremely supportive of the LGBT community after the Pulse nightclub shooting.

So did Trump throw away the inroads he was making with the LGBT community? Well, the pundits are doing everything in their power to make it look like that. I am not so sure though. The more rational among the LGB portion of the community should realize that this ban has nothing to do with them. They can still serve in the military and are not effected by this at all.

I would hope that the LGB community would realize that this was a rational descion and one that won't actually effect anyone but the T's. And Trump is about as good as they are going to get when it comes to LGBT rights among the Republicans and is doing quite a bit to increase the tolerance in the party. The fact that Trump was able to support gay marriage, have a gay man, Peter Thiel, speak for him at the convention and say that bathroom bills are a waste of time should be a major victory for the LGBT community, even if he doesn't want them in the military under the advice of his generals.

Finally, this is much ado about nothing. Something between .03 and .3 percent of the population is transgender and the numbers I have seen is that there is between 2000 and 6000 transgender people in the military. That's a rounding error in a 2 million soldier military. The number of people that will actually be effected by this directive is statistically insignificant.
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