So allow transgenders to serve, but just don't cover sex change surgeries under the Armed Forces' health plan. Treat it like any cosmetic surgery - get it, but pay for it from your own pocket.
@Jazzhead If the military treated it like any other cosmetic surgery, it wouldn't be allowed to happen.
The military has
never permitted service members to undergo voluntary elective surgery that removes them from duty. Heck, you can get court-martialed/disciplined for getting a bad
sunburn that makes you unable to perform your normal job duties. If a female service member gets elective breast implants on her own dime, she has to schedule during a leave period and be fully recovered by the time she returns. Sex change surgery is far more invasive, complicated, and results in much greater limitations for full duty for a much longer period of time. The period of incapacitation due to such surgery is incompatible with the demands of service, and always has been. And that's leaving aside all the costs of follow-up, monitoring, HRT, and post-surgery or HRT complications, all of which also can affect an individual's ability to do their job.
Doing so also would require the military medical system to train doctors on gender reassignment surgery and HRT, the complications therefrom, etc. And because transgendered service members could be deployed anywhere in the world, you couldn't just have a centralized cadre of doctors experienced in transgenderism for which they could go for treatment/monitoring. Each Battalion Surgeon, etc., would have to be trained in it.
Military leaders already spend far too much of their time worrying about things that have nothing to do with the core mission of warfighting. Transgenderism means yet more "HR" type training, development of new rules for how transgender soldiers should be treated, constant issues with berthing/sleeping/restroom usage, military uniform standards, fitness standards, etc..
It is a time-wasting headache that offers no corresponding benefit to the military. None.
This is a stupid fight over a non-existent problem. Cross-dressers have been around for years. They harm no one. I could care less what bathroom they use, or whether they can serve in the military.
That's because you're not the one responsible for organizing and leading troops. And confusing transgenderism with cross-dressing.....
A fair number of us voted for Trump in part because we were becoming concerned that social engineering was being given precedence over warfighting in the military. Mattis actually complained about exactly that in a memo he distributed the day before Trump's announcement. I'll simply say that the military is being nitpicked to death by these kind of things, and it has to stop.
Doing it by tweet was dumb, but that's far less important than the fact that he did it at all.
