Transgender bid reopens battle over social policy
President Trump returned the military to the culture wars of recent decades Wednesday with a tweeted declaration that transgender people can no longer serve “in any capacity” in the armed forces.
Conservative allies cheered it as a step back from what they saw as an effort by the Obama administration to run a social engineering experiment in the military. Transgender people and their advocates denounced it as bigoted, and even some of Trump’s fellow Republicans criticized it as shortsighted.
After a 20-year fight by LGBT activists and supporters to open the military to gays, lesbians and transgender people had seemingly been settled in their favor under former President Barack Obama, Trump returned to the battlefield with a series of early-morning tweets.
“After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military,” Trump tweeted. “Our military must be focused on decisive and over-
whelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail.”
Transgender people have been allowed to serve openly in the military since last July, when then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced a policy that allowed service members to transition gender in the military, set standards for medical care, and outlined responsibilities for military services and commanders to develop and implement guidance, training and other programs.
The White House was short on details for how Trump would implement his planned ban or how the military would go about removing the thousands of transgender people who are already in the services. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the president’s announcement is “something that the Department of Defense and the White House will have to work together on as implementation takes place.”
“This was about military readiness; this was about unit cohesion; this was about resources within the military and nothing more,” Sanders said.
LGBT activists and likeminded politicians promised to fight any ban, and said Trump’s tweets sounded similar to earlier orders barring nonwhite and gay people from the military.
“There is no resignation at all among us,” said retired Navy Cmdr. Zoe Dunning of San Francisco, a lesbian who retired in 2007 and helped lead the fight to overturn the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that barred openly gay and lesbian service members. “There is complete opposition. I hear nothing different in what Trump says from what was used to justify discrimination against African Americans and the LGBT community before — the same old thing about disrupting cohesion and effectiveness.”
Conservatives applauded the president’s move, saying transgender politics and medical costs they can bring with them — small though they may be — have no place in the military’s ranks or budgets.
“Obviously, we’re very happy with this decision by the president,” said Brian Brown, president of the National Organization for Marriage. “Like many Americans, we believe it’s long overdue. President Trump’s tweet says the military understand that the military is for fighting and winning wars, not engaging in a massive social experiment.”
Brown said he hoped Trump’s pronouncement was just the beginning of a larger rollback of LGBT presence in the military. “The whole subject of homosexuals in the military needs to be readdressed,” he said. “Unfortunately what we’ve been seeing on the part of some Republicans is some weak knees addressing this, but we’re working on that.”
For Felicia “Flames” Alvarado Elizondo, Trump’s tweets provoked two reactions. One was anger. The other was a feeling of deja vu.
Elizondo, 71, was a Navy seaman named Felipe serving in Vietnam in 1967 when she told her commanding officer she was gay. After a quick stint in the brig, she was booted out of the service. Within a few years, she had transitioned into a woman and become a genderrights activist — but nothing, she said, made her any less proud of having served her country.
“I was there to fight for my country, and it doesn’t matter what your gender is as long as you believe in democracy and fighting for you country,” said Elizondo, who lives in San Francisco. “People join the military to defend our freedom, and what Trump is doing is horrible. He doesn’t know us, or how we are.”
Alexander McCoy, a Marine veteran who is now affiliated with anti-Trump, ex-service members, disputed the president’s assertion that the presence of transgender people in the ranks is disruptive. What is disruptive, he said, are military efforts to hunt down people who are in the closet because their sexual orientation — or gender identification — is banned.
“The fact that Donald Trump is trying to return our military to (the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ era) is disgraceful,” said McCoy, spokesman for Common Defense, a national grassroots organization that has 15,000 members in California.
Reaction among politicians was quick, and not always predictable. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called Trump’s statement unclear and said the panel would hold hearings on the issue of transgender people serving in the military.
“There is no reason to force service members who are able to fight, train, and deploy to leave the military — regardless of their gender identity,” McCain said.
Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Iowa National Guard, said anyone who is qualified and can meet the physical training standards to serve in the military should be allowed the opportunity. However, Ernst also believes that “taxpayers shouldn’t cover the costs associated with a gender reassignment surgery,” a spokeswoman said.
Other Republicans strongly backed Trump, including Rep. Duncan Hunter of San Diego, a member of the House Armed Services Committee. He called for a restoration of “warrior culture” to allow the military “to get back to business.”
“National security should trump social experimentation, always,” Duncan said.
Probably the best-known transgender military veteran — Chelsea Manning, who served in the Army as a man and was court-martialed and convicted under the Espionage Act for leaking classified information to Wikileaks — tweeted that the president’s move “sounds like cowardice.” She said denying health care costs to transgender troops while supporting the $400 billion F-35 fighter jet program is “further reason we should dismantle the bloated and dangerous military-intelpolice state.”
Shane Ortega, 30, of Los Angeles, is a transgender man who served in the Marine Corps from 2005 to 2009 and then in the Army from 2009 to 2016. He served combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ortega began transitioning in 2010 while in the military. On Wednesday morning, he woke up to a phone call from a transgender person currently serving in the military who feared what will come next, and now, once again, feels compelled to hide his sexual orientation as much as possible.
“Disruption is not something (the president) is qualified to quantify because Donald Trump has never served in a tactical position in his life,” Ortega said. “Bullets don’t police gender. Bullets don’t care if you’re fat, green, purple or pink.”
Estimates of the number of transgender people in the military range from 6,000, as measured by a Rand Corp. study, to over 15,000, as tallied by the National Center for Transgender Equality.
Rand found that the cost of gender-transition procedures related to health care treatment is “relatively low.”
The total cost of medical care for transgender troops would increase health care costs by $2.4 million to $8.4 million annually, representing a 0.04 percent to 0.13 percent increase in Pentagon health care expenditures, the nonprofit research group said.
Transgender reassignment surgery — which not every trans person chooses to undergo — can cost anywhere from a few thousand dollars to nearly $100,000, depending on how extensive it is, said Courtney D’Allaird, founding coordinator for the Gender & Sexuality Resource Center at the University of Albany in New York.
A proposal in the House to eliminate transgender surgery funding for service members was defeated last week, with dozens of Republicans joining Democrats in voting against it.