Transgender Service Members: Serving in Silence

I don't believe transgender is one of them. I am not satisfied with the concept of gender unless it is backed up by peer reviewed neuroscience research rather than folkways and traditions. I also don't care if someone in the barracks I use is transgender because such people are not going to sexually assault me. If a physician or a nurse of the opposite sex is examining me I abide no superstition about what she sees so why should I worry about it so long as nothing has any credible sexual harassing context.

Ultimately it comes down to the answer to one question: Is the person deployable?

If you need to take any kind of maintenance medication... doesn't matter if it's for cholesterol, diabetes, high blood pressure, post-op transgender, or any other chronic medical conditions... you are non-deployable because if you do not get those medications your health can deteriorate to a point where you cannot complete your mission. If you have any kind of physical deformity or other physical condition beyond requiring eyeglasses, you also tend to be considered non-deployable depending on the condition.

Is it possible to say that such personnel must be limited to either CONUS or an in-theater fixed facility assignment to continue their service, but if those positions are also necessary for people without those chronic conditions to go through proper career advancement or to otherwise obtain necessary qualifications, restricting those positions to people with chronic medical conditions requiring maintenance medication makes the military about the person and not about retaining the best, brightest, and most capable personnel.

LTC (Join to see) - As MSG Sand responded to your post, it is, above all else, about standards; but it's also about distractions. Distractions do indeed disrupt the mission, and in military operations, disruptions simply must be avoided at all costs. Distractions become real issues when those distractions cannot be overcome and affect behavior and performance. You used racial minorities and women as examples of beneficial inclusion. Fortunately, we live in a society that, contrary to the popular buzz, does not have a race problem. Americans have evolved to the degree that truly intelligent and informed racists simply no longer exist in this country; except for those who employ the topic of racism for political gain, but that's a separate issue. Women in combat is an entirely different matter. Arguably, women can do any job as well as a man, provided physical stamina and endurance are not relevant factors in the task; however, it has been successfully demonstrated that most women lack the mental toughness for combat. While there are certainly exceptions, they are in fact exceptions. Likewise, there are men who also lack this toughness, but they are the exceptions and they are hopefully weeded out. In this day and age, it is not possible to eliminate a woman just because she's not up to the job. When the topic of gender comes into play, "inclusion" is more important than effectiveness. Then there are the distractions involved. Male POWs may experience tremendous anguish watching a colleague be beaten and tortured, but can still maintain their composure and continue to think clearly through it. Those same men may have far more difficulty watching a woman get tortured and gang raped. It makes everyone far more vulnerable. And let's suppose that certain issues come down to nothing more than old-fashioned chauvinism. It may not be "fair" for this environment to exist, but the mere fact that it often does is reason enough not to let it affect readiness. Face it, while there is the rare exception of the superior female warrior, no fighting force has ever been made more effective by the inclusion of women. The same holds true of gays and transexuals.

In adding to MSG Sand's response.....
The US armed forces, tasked with the protection and safeguarding of our freedoms from those who would take it from us, is no place for Social Equity, social experimentation or social engineering and never a forum for expressing one's individuality. It reminds me a bit of our Joint exercises with NATO in the 1990s, where long hair, sloppy dress, wearing of personal buttons and pins on their uniform was allowed and use of marijuana was tolerated in certain Nordic countries. The quip amongst US and British forces was these units make formidable military units....until somebody shoots at them.

CPT William Gordon - You can pull down a PDF to Word converter from the internet. Just use your favorite search engine and type in PDF to Word converter. I use it so often I created a shortcut on my desktop.
Thanks,
Rick

Perfect illustration of how misused the 'D' word is. Discrimination is merely the selection from among alternatives. Any time one applicant is selected from a group, discrimination takes place. There's nothing wrong with standards, and there's tremendous danger in tampering with how an entity chooses to discriminate.

You forgot you ain’t got no hair.

SFC (Join to see) - Please send me this PDF to me at [login to see]

It is bad when something comes up in the middle of a long post/attempted explanation of reasoning.

If Trans have not fully transitioned, they are not the other gender. So it would be unjust and lead to problems to put an untransitioned “female” in with the females, “male” with males.

It’s not a matter whether a person is willing to work or have a desire to serve their country. Their special needs are a burden on the military and destabilizing, just as if a bunch of handicapped people were allowed to enlist. Why can’t my husband who can’t walk right enlist?

When it comes to "Progressive thinking", what makes "sense" is not always a required ingredient. Rules and regs. put in place many years ago by the military made sense then and nothing in the ensuing years has changed that.