Transgenderism in the Military
In response to Donald Trumpās most recent attempt to establish federal policy via Twitter, I think that, as I often do, I am going to have to take a policy position that will anger people on both sides of our contrived political aisle.
Military policy is about life and death. Not just for those individuals currently serving, but for our entire nation. That being the case, it is my general philosophy that the military is not the place for political correctness, political statements, or social experiments. The military should do what works, and its leadership should tell bothĀ āliberalsā andĀ āconservativesā to go to hell if they demand anything different.
As Twitter only allows 140 characters per tweet, Trump was not able to give many details for his reasoning, despite the fact that he decided to get verbose and stretch his edict out to make it an epic series of three tweets. All that he expressed on Twitter was that this decision was motivated by:
...the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail...
ByĀ ātremendous medical costsā, we can assume that he means gender reassignment surgery. As forĀ ādisruptionā, he will need to explain how transgender people are more disruptive than homosexuals, who, as of now, are still allowed to serve. I will await his explanation before commenting on that.
My position on all of this is simple: No civilian authority should place a statutory ban on transgender people serving in the military, but the military should not be required to pay for gender reassignment surgery either.
Some have countered Trumpās Twitter edict by saying that the total cost of such surgeries is negligible with regards to the militaryās total budget. I am not convinced by that. The fact is that this simply is not something that the military should be paying for. We can come up with any number of possible elective expenses and say that the military should pay for them because they would account for just a small percentage of the total budget. The fact that it is a relatively small expense in no way implies that it is an expense that the military should cover.
Transgender people may feel inclined to say that the type of genitals they have does not play any role in their ability to do their job. However, if that is the case, that only shows that the military should not, in fact, be paying for gender reassignment surgery. You cannot simultaneously argue that an expense item is both work-related and irrelevant to your ability to do your job.
If a particular service member feels that he or she is incapable of doing his or her job without gender reassignment surgery paid for by the military, the military should be able to weigh its options and decide internally whether to pay for the surgery or discharge the service member. That should be a decision made by military staff based on the value of what this individual brings to our nationās defense, and not by politicians or activists.
Some will say that gender reassignment surgery is a necessary expense such as treating battle wounds or replacing a failing kidney. However, the fact is that it is not comparable. Gender dysphoria is not something caused by war or by the work done in military positions, and it is, by all accounts, a pre-existing condition. If that condition is manageable such that gender reassignment surgery is a purely elective thing (as it is for many transgender people who do not seek surgery), there is no reason for the military to foot the bill for an elective surgery such as that. If the condition is not manageable without surgery, the military should have the ability to deny entry to transgender people who have not yet had gender reassignment surgery on the grounds that they have a pre-existing medical condition making them unfit for service, just as the military would deny entry to a man needing a kidney transplant. In either case, there is no reason for the military to be paying for this surgery.
I do not want decisions about who is or is not fit for service to be made by either left-wing social justice warriors or right-wing religious fanatics who are trying to turn the military into a microcosm for what they want the rest of the country to be. Instead, I want such decisions to be made by those who actually have some idea about how they will affect the military and its ability to do its job. Similarly, I do not want funds set aside for the defense of our nation to be used on something that even those requesting the funds would say has no bearing on the defense of our nation. It is not Donald Trumpās place to issue a ban on transgender service members contrary to the advice of those in the Defense Department. As for his stated concerns, those can be addressed by clearly expressing that our military will not be paying for gender reassignment surgery unless it feels that it has good reason for doing so.
As a final note, I know that some leftists will counter by pointing to various ludicrous expenses that the military engages in that significantly exceed the paltry costs of a few elective surgeries for a tiny proportion of military personnel. To that, I simply say: You folks are preaching to the choir. For example.
