Trump Gonna Fire All The Trans People In The Military, Again
But more-better this time.
After years of celebrating trans inclusion in his own beauty pageants, President Donald Trump announced in July 2017 that trans people would be ineligible to serve in the US military “in any capacity.” The Pentagon, which Trump insisted advised him to institute the ban, was caught by surprise, apparently entirely unaware Trump’s action was in the works. The violation of normal procedures meant that Trump’s administration didn’t have the normal justifications or evidence that one associates with something called “policymaking,” which is apparently a thing some presidents do. As a result the inevitable lawsuits had considerable early success and it wasn’t until 2019 that any form of ban was put into practice, and this reduced policy prohibited enlisting rather than firing those already in service.
Joe Biden, of course, reversed the policy, and so somewhere between 5,000 and 20,000 are openly serving the US in its military services today. According to The Times of London, Trump is going to fix that this time around:
Donald Trump is planning an executive order that would lead to the removal of all transgender members of the US military, defence sources say.
The order could come on his first day back in the White House, January 20. There are believed to be about 15,000 active service personnel who are transgender. They would be medically discharged, which would determine that they were unfit to serve.
While Trump blames the costs of medical care and the impacts on unit cohesion when a service member has gender confirmation surgery, neither Trump’s previous policy nor the descriptions of his next administration’s executive order contain any exemptions for anyone having completed surgery already.
Hmm.
Weirdly, the best knockdown of Trump’s bullshit justifications come from the Rand Corporation, a conservative and hyper-militaristic think tank. In June 2016, a full year before Trump’s famous tweet, Rand released a report saying that annual costs for active duty trans personnel would total $2.4 to $8.4 million, and that each year a measly 29 to 129 troops “would seek transition-related care that could disrupt their ability to deploy.”
As for costs, that $8.4M extreme high end number from Rand? Yeah, that totals 10 percent of what the Pentagon spends on Penis Poppers each year. And while admittedly that number includes quite a lot of spending on retirees, the costs for active duty personnel total — wait for it — about 10 percent of the $84M in Viagra purchases, or $8.4M.
The low down on deployment? Active duty personnel total ~1.3M, so even at Rand’s high end of 129, that represents 1 percent of 1 percent of all service members. Yr Wonkette, born on the internet in January 2004, is almost old enough to remember when cis women’s pregnancies were still being used as an example of a “readiness problem” sufficient to justify excluding women from units and specialities, and even from the entire military if they get pregnant while unmarried. US Medicine reports that 12,564 members of the Air Force, Army, Marines, and Navy gave birth in 2019, a number 100 times higher than the expected effect of trans deployments, and yet somehow the military found a way to accommodate them.
If Wonkette can be forgiven for perseverating a moment, the 15,000-ish people to be fired represent a slightly higher hit to readiness than 30 to 130 people missing a few weeks or months each year. Even Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Don’t Pursue had exceptions for personnel with hard-to-replace expertise (language fluencies were often cited). While there’s no telling what the exact wording of the future executive order will be until it’s public, nothing in current reporting suggests that this will be anything other than a clean sweep, firing all trans people serving in a manner rather reminiscent of Argentina’s mass firing of trans federal employees earlier this year.
This seems mildly relevant given that the Pentagon has for years been missing recruitment goals and is currently behind $8.5M on bonus payments to soldiers who attended training to become recruiters last winter when the Army was frantic to gain more recruiting specialists. Yes, you read that correctly, just one branch of the military was so short staffed it spent the entire trans health care budget on just the bonus payments for a few months of recruiting school. Your friendly, neighborhood Crip Dyke is a babe in the woods when it comes to understanding life in the military, but it sure seems like even if Trump was worried about being unable to deploy trans folks, converting them to recruiters is a fabulous option.
So if trans inclusion is better for readiness and no more expensive than annual maintenance on our flagging officers’ heat seeking moisture missiles, whence comes Trump’s trans fixation? Oh, Axios, for once we love your concise bullet-point reporting:
Project 2025 calls for transgender people to be banned from serving in the military, saying, “gender dysphoria is incompatible with the demands of military service.”
And that’s the nut. In that 1999 Air Command & Staff College white paper cited above supposedly about women’s readiness, they had this to say:
Nearly 40% of the pregnant females in the III Corps at Fort Hood are unmarried. This is an alarming figure not only because of its moral implications but also because of the readiness issues involved. [emphasis Wonkette’s]
Zealots and bigots will always work to find justifications for their crappy, hateful actions other than being crappy, hateful people. For decades they tried to use their own petty hatreds as evidence that unit readiness would be harmed if the Pentagon was no longer able to discriminate on this or that characteristic. But their personal disdain shines through even as they attempt to dress their excuses in fresh pressed camouflage. The anti-woke brigade’s moral superiority complex is going to fire thousands of trans people currently more than happy to serve their country — and the anti-woke brigade is once again happy to harm national security in the process. It’s hard to imagine that the gay boys and the Muslims won’t be next to go.
Previously in Military Moral Panics!
Your friendly, neighborhood Crip Dyke also writes Pervert Justice!
Alternate headline:
Trans Tinkle-Tackle Terrifies Trump, Troops Terminated
This sucks entirely for those trans military members that have given years to military careers and are due the appropriate pensions. I can only hope that those people can find redress with the legal system. With this Supreme Court, I have my doubts.
I’m wondering, though, why this needs to be a first-day action. It takes away a big “rile up the bigots” issue that the right loves to use to keep their base angry. I mean, you know they’ll find someone else to scapegoat, but still, you’d think they’d want to keep these issues dragging on and sucking up media focus for the performative grievance cycle.