 |
| A transgender airman. |
The Trump/Pence regime continues its jihad to write transgender individuals out of existence and to drive them out of the U.S. military. Why? Because Trump's critical evangelical base hates them as does Mike Pence, a modern day Pharisee if there ever was one. Transgender individuals - even more that gays - challenge the Christofascists' knowledge rejecting 12th century understanding of human sexuality and, most terrifying to them, suggests that the rubbish their churches peddle to them is simply untrue. Nothing is more terrifying to an evangelical that (i) having to think for themselves, and (ii) realizing their entire sense of self and world view has been built on falsehoods. Hence the almost irrational hatred for gays and other members of the LGBT community by the "godly folk" to whom Trump has consistently prostituted himself through anti-LGBT policies. Meanwhile, the U.S. military for the most part has no problem with transgender service members who perform their jobs and other not the disruptive influence that the always lying Trump and Pence claim. A piece in the New York Times looks at the reality of transgender troops. Here are article highlights:
Transgender troops like Senior Airman Sterling Crutcher are seen as “an unreasonable burden” by the Trump administration. It says their presence hurts morale and the military’s ability to fight, and that they have no place in uniform.
That’s news to Airman Crutcher. He just got back from a deployment with his B-52 bomber squadron, and when he did, fellow airmen in his squadron, whom he counts among his best friends, threw a shower for him and his wife, Aimee, to celebrate their first child, born in February.
“At my level, it’s not an issue,” Airman Crutcher, 30, said about serving while transgender. “I can meet and exceed all the standards, and the people I work with, they like me. They have a lot of questions, but they don’t have a problem.”
This has been an uneasy time for transgender troops in the United States military, caught between a commander in chief who wants them out and court injunctions that, at least temporarily, said they could stay.
But dozens of transgender troops like Airman Crutcher said in interviews that they felt supported in the service. Their comrades and commanders have welcomed them, they said, and the military has often been more accepting than the homes and neighborhoods they left to enlist.
Nearly 1,000 troops officially deemed as transgender are currently serving in the American military, according to the Defense Department, and another 228 are in the process of enlisting. They are all over the globe in a wide spectrum of roles — infantry officers, armor platoon leaders, drill sergeants, intelligence specialists, Arabic linguists, nuclear reactor operators. A transgender instructor teaches leadership at the Naval Academy.
The Defense Department laid out its arguments for excluding transgender troops before the House Armed Services Committee late last month. James N. Stewart, a senior Pentagon official, testified that transgender troops were more prone to mental health issues than other troops, and that when they transition, medical treatments can make them nondeployable for months — factors that he said would make recruits ineligible to serve if they stemmed from other kinds of pre-existing health conditions.
Other troops and military leaders disagree. Five transgender troops who also testified at the hearing said that, aside from the uncertainty created by the change in policy, they had encountered few problems transitioning in uniform. Instances of harassment have been few, according to Sparta, an association of transgender troops.
And in testimony before the Senate last spring, the heads of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps all said they were not aware of any issues caused by having transgender troops serving openly.
Many transgender recruits come from socially conservative small towns or strict religious upbringings, and have spent their youth feeling like misfits. Some troops who were born anatomically male said in interviews that they enlisted with the initial hope that military service would drum feminine feelings out of them.
“I hoped it would straighten me out — I didn’t want my family to hate me,” said Aylanna Anderson, an Air Force staff sergeant who was raised Catholic in a tiny West Texas town and became an Eagle Scout. “I hoped I could leave what I saw as this dark part of me behind.”
To her surprise, after enlisting in 2012, Sergeant Anderson said, she found a culture that emphasized judging people by ability, not identity. She began to transition to female in 2017.
Airman Crutcher, who grew up in a Pentecostal household in rural Missouri, said he wrote a heartfelt letter to his family about his lifelong sense of being a boy in a girl’s body, but they refused to read it, asking him instead if he was on drugs.
By contrast, when he came out to his Air Force commander, he said the reaction was, “What do I need to do for you? I want to make sure you are supported.”
A few days back from a deployment to Guam with his bomber squadron, he was shopping for a crib with his pregnant wife when they got a text from his mother.
But it wasn’t his birth mother, who he says essentially disowned him after he told her in 2015 that he was transgender. It was his Air Force mother — Kim Thomas, the wife of a lieutenant colonel, who informally adopted him after meeting him during basic training. He now spends holidays with her family and calls her Mom.
A 2016 RAND Corporation study found that nearly one-fifth of transgender troops do not plan to transition medically. Those who do transition may, depending on gender and preference, undergo hormone therapy, breast removal and other procedures, like surgery to make facial features and voices more gender appropriate. All are covered by the military.
The cost and disruption associated with surgery is a chief complaint of critics, but the RAND study estimated that those factors would be negligible, with fewer than 200 active troops transitioning per year at a total cost of less than $10 million. In interviews, troops who have transitioned said they tried to time their surgical procedures for scheduled lulls in unit activity, and sometimes put them off because of deployments or demanding work assignments.
Capt. Alivia Stehlik is a transgender woman who graduated from West Point as a man in 2008, completed the Army’s punishing Ranger School and led an infantry platoon. She is now an Army physical therapist stationed at Fort Carson, Colo.
In an interview at her home, she said her transition should be seen as an asset, not a burden. She volunteered to deploy to Afghanistan with an infantry brigade last spring after the unit’s regular physical therapist became pregnant. Captain Stehlik spent nearly a year hopping helicopters from base to base, treating sprains and other injuries with a medical bag in one hand and an M-4 rifle in the other. Six-foot-three and broad-shouldered, she said it would have been pretty obvious to the 1,700 soldiers she treated that she was transgender, but it was never a problem.
The real problem is the hate, bigotry, and willful embrace of evangelicals and "conservative" Christians which, rather than being coddled, needs to be eradicated from society. Instead of banning transgender troops, ban the evangelicals and make them social outcasts.
