"Delta is one of the thousands of openly transgender service members who would be prohibited from serving in the military as part of new legislation introduced in Congress". (emphasis mine)
I'm sorry: what? Really?
Thousands???
Let's analyze this.
We'll examine the numbers, first using a liberal estimate. Researchers at the
Williams Institute, a think tank at UCLA's Law School focused on gender identity public policy, concluded In June 2022 that the percentage and number of adults who identify as transgender included approximately about 0.5% of all U.S. adults or 1.64 million people over the age of 13 in the United States who identify as transgender, having a different gender identity than the sex they were assigned at birth. A more comprehensive and scientific study can be found here, at the
American Journal of Public Health:
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2016.303578 The AJPH study cited above found the number of transgenders to be less than 1 million, but adjusting for the change in population between the study date (2017) and now, let us use 1,000,000 as a current estimate.
There were a total of 1.195 million active-duty military, according to September 2021 data from the Department of Defense. So at that time, with approximately 332 million Americans, we are talking about of 0.36% of the US population in the armed forces. That would result in a
maximum of about 5,975 transgender persons in the US Armed forces, based on the Williams Institute's work, and about 3,600 based on the AJPH.
Okay - that's "thousands".
But that number
also assumes that transgender people have
exactly the same propensity as the average heterosexual person to want to join a branch of the US military as any other citizen.
Raise your hand if you believe that.
I don't see a lot of hands.
Why?
Because, likely: you have lived long enough to know how people behave and what choices they tend to make. And if you assume that gay or transgendered people are far more likely to gravitate toward, say, roles in entertainment and the arts, you are not merely guessing. It is a demonstrable, observable fact.
Now, even if they were disposed toward pursuing military careers, how many would be able to meet basic physical requirements in order to do so?
That is why I would propose that the actual numbers are much smaller - hundreds, rather than thousands.
But as with our culture as a whole today: they are the ones dictating policy for the rest of us.