It’s still unclear how exactly President Trump will formalize his decision to ban transgender individuals from serving in the military in any capacity. In the future, he should make things clear, direct, and formal before tweeting like a millennial from the hip (but the world should be full of unicorns too, so life is full of disappointments). But if the tweets from Wednesday eventually take the form of an executive order, Trump made the right decision, however impulsive it was and unpopular it may sound.
The U.S. military has one goal: Protect and defend. Or as Article 1 section 8 of the Constitution reads, “to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.”
The goal of the military is not a social experiment; it’s not even to see who is the most patriotic. (I’m a patriot but I couldn’t physically do what’s required of many of our service people.) Its job is not to see if men and women can both do the same amount of push-ups, or if a woman can hold up in a unit of mostly men without interrupting the männerbund, or if a woman who identifies as a man can drag a 170-pound male away from heavy gun fire.
Its job is not to pay for people to have elective surgeries so they feel more like a woman or a man.
While trans activists, including Caitlyn Jenner, are understandably upset about the ban, many members of the military who have seen active combat both support transgenders and agree with Trump’s decision, not because they are mean, old-fashioned bigots but because they view the active recognition of transgenders in the military as more of a petri dish of social experiments, wrapped in a progressive agenda.
There may be a place for that — the military is not that place.
All that matters is the effective and efficient lethality of our military. A deterrent keeping America safe. Everything else is politics.
— Tim Kennedy (@TimKennedyMMA) July 26, 2017
Serving in the military is a privilege not a right. And it is sure as hell not a social experiment.
— J.R. Salzman (@jrsalzman) July 26, 2017
Opinions on this vary of course, but being transgender is not a biological issue, it’s a psychological one. If a 98-pound woman was starving herself because she thought she was fat, would you tell her that’s okay so she feels good about herself, or would you gently tell her she’s emaciated, hurting her body, and needs to look to the path of recovery?
This Johns Hopkins psychiatrist believes making drastic physical changes, such as undergoing transgender reassignment surgery, do nothing to help the psychological troubles plaguing the mind of the transgender person — in fact, it can make them worse. That’s why throwing people who are already struggling with their own identity, psychologically and, in their minds, physically, into a combative, war-torn, physically-demanding, mentally-exhausting environment may make units fall apart, thereby rendering the military less effective than before.
This veteran says it best:
War is no place for people who are mentally, emotionally, or physically confused or in turmoil. You have your shit together, or you don’t.
— J.R. Salzman (@jrsalzman) July 26, 2017
Nicole Russell is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist in Washington, D.C., who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota. She was the 2010 recipient of the American Spectator’s Young Journalist Award.
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