Pentagon Decrees Trans Military Members Out Themselves And Leave ‘Voluntarily,' Or Get Witch-Hunted
What a way to treat people risking their lives!
There’s nothing legal about Lord Bone Spurs’s animus-soaked anti-trans executive decrees, declaring that because boys make small cells and girls make big cells and pronouns confuse him, trans people must get kicked out the military. And so his proclamations have gotten properly rejected by every court trans service members have brought them to.
Every court, that is, except the Supreme Court, which released a one-page no-comment ruling last week that the Draft-Dodger-In-Chief can have his EMERGENCY ban on trans people serving in the military while the government appeals its loss at the Ninth Circuit. The Court had no need to take this up at all, and by taking it up and making a point of letting Trump do his ban on the basis of some fake emergency, the court has already bought into his bullshit. As usual!
Never mind that multiple federal judges have found the decree is against the equal protection that Justice Neil Gorsuch his very own self affirmed trans people were entitled to four years ago in Bostock v. Clayton County.
PREVIOUSLY!
Never mind how in court, DOJ lawyers could not say how the military could define or identify people who exhibit “symptoms of gender dysphoria,” or say how many trans people there even are in the military (the New York Times says 4,240), and offered no evidence of any kind of “medical, surgical and mental health constraints” that were causing a military readiness issue, or identify any issue besides that Trump and Pete Hegseth have seething, unadulterated animus towards trans people in particular.
Trans people have served honorably in the military for years, some even decades. Somebody’s pronouns have yet to make a fighter jet fall off an aircraft carrier, or put war plans in the group chat.
But Plenary Executive Commander is Lord of all He Surveys.
And so now with the blessing of the SCOTUS you-know-which six, SecDef Boozehole has sent out a missive from him Defense Department makeup chair to stop all gender-affirming care in the military, and put forth his plan to identify trans people and remove them. That plan is, force them to out themselves by a deadline and leave, or get witch-hunted and lose their benefits.
Ordered his memo: “service members who have a current diagnosis or history of or exhibit symptoms consistent with gender dysphoria may elect to separate voluntarily” by June 6. If they do, the military won’t ask any questions, departing service members will not be asked to pay back any benefits that they got, and they will get double severance pay.
But after that deadline, military snoops will be combing through all 2.1 million servicepeople’s medical records, presumably with an Elon Musk Trans-Hating Grokbot 3000, witch-hunting for anyone whose records show they have been “exhibiting symptoms.” Vague!
And then after the deadline, people who did not self-confess and get caught being “gender symptomatic” gender traitors could get a dishonorable discharge, and lose access to their pensions and severance.
Then pasty Pete blarted out more gross crap: “No more pronouns, no more climate change obsessions, no more emergency vaccine mandates, no more DUDES IN DRESSES. We are done with that shit.”
So far about 1,000 of the estimated 4,200-ish trans troops have taken Hegseth up on the “voluntary” extortion-offer-you-can’t-refuse.
Seems like this opens the door for anybody to leave if they want to go! Just tell ‘em you’ve been feeling kind of transgender lately, and ta-da, now you have a get-out-of-the-service free card! Is America’s military readiness improved yet? Putin says “da.”
It’s all so insulting, to the hardworking service people who deserve nothing but THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE, to the taxpayers who paid millions of dollars to train these service people and will now pay them severance not to work, and also pay to have their replacements recruited and trained. And also an insult to the intelligence of anybody with two brain cells to rub together. Trans people are too strong for sports, but too weak for the military? Our military is the strongest in the world, but crumbles like an unfluoridated tooth when somebody says a pronoun?
And it’s terribly sad for trans kids, especially ones with a shithole home life situation, blocking a potential path for them to get out and earn healthcare and money for college.
All part of the bigger culture war of trying to scrub the existence of trans people from public life, from government webpages to libraries, to reinterpreting Title IX to illegally exclude trans people from sex discrimination protection in education to blocking trans people from changing the sex marker on their passports.
America has now left the world of science and civil rights, and entered Martha-Ann Alito’s lagoon in a land of Christian extremist binary unga-bunga. But guess what, Martha-Ann? Trans people have ALWAYS existed, and they will always continue to do so, no matter how much you yell and your neighbors and sew vergogna flags to flap at them!
Final word to Jordan Klepper and three transgender servicemembers and one guy who hopes to join, who still willing to serve our country, even though it’s currently treating them terribly for no justifiable reason.
[Navy HR]
I know it's going to be a great day when the first Wonkette story of the morning fills me with such seething rage that I have to immediately stop Interneting or have an aneurysm.
So....."We want to get rid of trans people in the service because we believe you are unable to perform to standard and your very presence is disruptive. But we can't tell whether you're trans, either from your appearance or your performance of your duties, so unless you quit, we'll have to invade your private medical records to find out."