The Transgender War
By 
It didn’t take long for the Trump administration’s war on transgender troops to get underway. One week after his inauguration, President Trump issued an executive order misleadingly titled “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness.” The order—which was initially blocked by two federal judges but reinstated in early May by the Supreme Court—asserts that “expressing a false ‘gender identity’ divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service.” Under the new policy, transgender soldiers with any diagnosis, history, or symptoms of gender dysphoria will be discharged.
Trump’s order offers three reasons why transgender people should be excluded from military service. It posits, first, that transgender soldiers undermine unit cohesion, which is argued to be an essential ingredient of military effectiveness; second, that transgender people are incapable of meeting the military’s rigorous standards and adversely affect readiness; and third, that transgender soldiers lack the honor and truthfulness needed to serve because they are living a lie.
The problem is that each of these claims is false, as I noted when these issues arose when Trump first came into office. Transgender troops have served honorably with no adverse effect on cohesion or readiness for years. The order to remove them from the military is not based on any evidence to the contrary and is thus without foundation.
And Trump sees tremendous political value in attacking trans Americans in other contexts:
I’ll tell you something that’s going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less. The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime. They’re saying, “We don’t want these people coming in. We don’t want you burning our shopping centers. We don’t want you shooting our people in the middle of the street.”
The radicals on the left are the problem, and they’re vicious and they’re horrible and they’re politically savvy, although they want men in women sports, they want transgender for everyone. They want open borders.
I don’t think that the connection between transgender enemies and immigration is accidental:
President Trump entered the White House in January promising both the “largest deportation program in American history” and a “golden age” for American businesses.
But in recent weeks, the tension between those two promises has spilled out into the open, leading Mr. Trump to reverse or contradict some of his most significant anti-immigration policies when they threatened to disrupt the economy.
Mr. Trump has celebrated his success in driving down illegal border crossings and in cracking down on immigration more broadly. But he walks a careful line when his hard-line policies collide with his economic agenda — particularly when it comes to foreign workers, student visas and industries that rely on immigrant labor.
The changing positions have not only infuriated his far-right allies, but have also confused those aiming to carry out his deportation policies.
I guess there are two messages here.
This really is an existential conflict, and it’s not obvious where it ends. The administration and its allies are hostile to the existence of trans folk, and are happy to float a variety of proposals designed to undercut rights to press, assembly, and to bear arms. Part of this is ideological commitment and part of it is opportunism. With respect to the latter, I follow more than a few Trump-hating conservatives who turn back into frothing reactionaries when trans issues get mentioned… so the issue is in some ways a means of shoring up an increasingly shaky coalition. I doubt that Trump himself cares much about trans folks at all, and I doubt that JD Vance cares much more… but then it really doesn’t matter what they believe in their hearts. Moderates or “centrists” (the term is being used so much that it’s on the verge of ceasing to have any meaning) have to accept that a “grand bargain” in which adolescent transition is limited and trans athletes are barred from certain sporting events is not on the table. It’s not what the administration wants, and it’s not what the administration will settle for.
But existential conflicts cut both ways in terms of strategy. You cannot win this type of fight by carving people who agree with you 85% of the time out of the coalition. Some people are squeamish about youth transition and sketchy about trans folk in women’s sports, but still of the mind that trans Americans deserve basic human rights, aren’t bloodthirsty radicals, and in general should be left to live their lives as they see fit. You can have these people on your side or you can decide they’re on the other side; the former is the correct choice and the latter is the incorrect choice. This seems so obvious that it barely bears mention… except I have an account on the social media network “Bluesky” and it’s definitely not obvious there (although the worst offenders in this regard often fancy themselves to be “allies” rather than trans folk per se). Nevertheless, it’s time for trans folks and their allies to embrace their inner Churchill, and at least make a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.
…y’all are dicks who are evidently committed to the most ungenerous reading possible, but I suppose that I left implicit what I should have made explicit:
Photo Credit: By Ted Eytan – 2017.07.29 Stop Transgender Military Ban, Washington, DC USA 7728, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=61396183