Trump Bans Transgenders in Military

By | August 3, 2017

WASHINGTON DC, August 4 (C-Fam) President Donald Trump announced via Tweet last week that as Commander in Chief he was banning the gender confused from serving in the U.S. military. The ban will take effect once the official order is issued to the Department of Defense by the White House.

Trump cited the concerns about the cost of healthcare for transgenders including the enormous cost of so-called sex change operations. According to the Encyclopedia of Surgery, the cost of a male-to-female surgery, castration and the building of a crude vagina, is $20,000, while the cost of female-to-male, including amputation of otherwise healthy breasts, and the building of a crude penis, runs upwards of $50,000. The estimates are only for the surgery, and do not include the costs for the lifetime necessity of hormones to keep their innate sexes in check.

Trump is also concerned about unit cohesion. In the proposed pro-transgender Army regulations circulated during the Obama administration, was included verbiage about treating everyone with “dignity and respect.” It raised perplexing questions for troops such as whether a female soldier shows dignity and respect to an anatomically correct male who enters her shower if she were to cover up and turn away in natural modesty. The service woman could reasonably fear disciplinary action for doing so. Precedent has already been set for such action, such as the discharging from the service of Christian military chaplains for adhering to their beliefs about homosexuality.

The pro-transgender policy raised questions of military readiness. A recently issued Rand Corporation report found that post-operative transsexuals could be non-deployable for up to four months. Non-deployability for significant lengths of time are grounds for dismissal from the military. Moreover, hormone shots require refrigeration, something not available on all deployments.

Estimates of current transgenders in the military vary greatly. The Rand Corporation estimates between 1,300 and 6,000 service members identify as transgender. The pro-transgender Williams Institute at UCLA estimates 15,000. The New England Journal of Medicine says 12,000. But these are only estimates and no one really knows.

Estimates also vary about the number who would require so-called sex-changes. Rand says less than 100 at a cost of no more than $5 million. However, the numbers could go much higher with estimates ranging between $300 and $700 million.

Medical experts point out that the notion of transgenderism is not supported by science. Advocates have claimed that it is in the brain or the genes, but no robust and methodologically sound scientific study has shown this conclusively. Distinguished psychiatrists consider it a psychological condition that requires treatment. Longtime head of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, Dr. Paul McHugh, draws an analogy between transgenderism and anorexia. The anorexic looks in the mirror and sees a fat person looking back, McHugh finds, while the gender confused sees themselves as another sex. Neither are based in biology; both are based in a psychological imbalance, he concludes.

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