Gender makes no military difference
PRESIDENT Donald Trump has banned transgender members from serving in the military as it would be “disruptive and degrade readiness”.
The Pentagon covers the expense of 250 military personnel transitioning with already 15,000 in the armed services.
The gender of soldiers in the military has always been contentious. Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange, wrote a dystopian novel The Wanting Seed where the solution to population control in a police state was to force male armies to fight female ones, taking the battle of the sexes to a literal level.
In the days Germaine Greer was promoting her book The Female Eunuch she quipped there were few occupations which required a particular gender.
In ancient history women were some of the fiercest warriors. Archaeologists in Turkey discovered that the Amazons used to remove one of their breasts to better shoot their arrows. Boadicea, now celebrated in opera, led the early Britons against the Romans. Joan of Arc has been immortalised in bronze and celluloid. In modern history, Israel was the first country to have conscription for women. A Russian study done three decades ago, however, claimed sex equality was a fiction, “... female warriors are not to transgress the normal, biologically prescribed confines of their sex”. Only recently have Australian and American women been permitted on the front line. There is also a tradition of gay men in battle. Plato wrote of the Ancient Greeks that an army in which homosexuality was encouraged would be invincible. Alexander the Great and Richard the Lionheart were homosexuals.
An Obama administration directive last year allowed transgender members to serve openly, putting an end to the Clinton 1993 policy, “Don’t ask, don’t tell”. The transgender intelligence consultant Chelsea Manning ( previously Bradley Manning) who had her sentence commuted by President Obama is still a member of the military and allowed to live anywhere she chooses. A recent British study confirms that gender reassignment had minimal impact on military readiness.
An episode on gender transitioning in the American TV drama Nip/ Tuck stated a truism that a surgical operation did not change the chromosomes. WILLIAM ROSS,
Cranbrook.