As a trans veteran I’m angry at calls to stop funding gender reassignment surgery
We seem to be in an era where information has never mattered less. I was enraged when I read that Liberal MP Andrew Hastie was again relying on his beliefs rather than reality in calling for the Australian defence force (ADF) to stop funding evidence based treatment for members with gender dysphoria. As the person who made the ADF stop kicking out its trans members in 2010, this really hurt. It’s salt in a still open wound that may never heal.
I went from being a combat leader to a researcher when I was handed a termination notice after a decade of training, service and deployments, just because I wanted to transition, be true to myself, and keep serving. I poured over legal and medical information, contacted overseas militaries with serving and former serving trans people and put together what I thought was a pretty tight case. The hierarchy of the army and ADF in the Canberra bubble resisted, but eventually, after extensive – and expensive – legal advice, and with the then attorney general weighing in, they decided that I was right.
That struggle to achieve change took a huge personal toll, all to just get the ADF to catch up to the Canadian forces and the British ministry of defence. They had been supporting their members for years and had deployed a few, with no earth-shattering negative consequences. My career ended, and I’m still suffering from the depression and anxiety that came from the conflict and breakdown in the relationship between me and the army that I served.
Andrew Hastie said in the Australian, “I do not see how these surgeries enhance our war-fighting capability as a nation. It’s a bad joke. Why is the ADF now a vehicle for radical social engineering?”. I’m disgusted and disappointed in what is either massive ignorance or disingenuous claims aimed at stirring up hate. It is ADF policy to give members all evidence-based medical treatment that they need to remain deployable. That includes dental and many other treatments for which members the public have huge waits and may be out of pocket for, or just struggle without. Fixing someone’s gender dysphoria and enabling them to continue serving with all their expensive training and invaluable experience rather than kicking them to the kerb maintains rather than loses capability. Gender dysphoria is likely to have had you running well below your full capacity all your life, even if you weren’t aware what it was.
Secondly, the throwaway claim of radical social engineering is ridiculous. Calling evidence-based medicine radical shows a refusal to accept new information and a reliance on ignorance. There are those who have this weird misconception that our ADF should be full of manly barbarians who don’t follow any social conventions. The reality is that the opposite is true. In addition to our ADF being a part of and a reflection of society, we expect our defence members to adhere to civil law, military law, and when deployed, laws of armed conflict and rules of engagement. If anything, we need thinkers who are a part of our own culture and who can rely on the members of their team unreservedly. We don’t need a bunch of intolerant thugs in a professional volunteer force with world class training.
The US are culturally very different to Europe and former British Commonwealth countries like ours, with a distinct legal and medical system. I don’t think their population would accept change without serious authority behind it. They commissioned the RAND corporation, that released a report in 2016 about the impact of trans personnel on readiness and cost. The short version is that it isn’t a biggy. Interestingly, the report listed 18 countries whose military allowed trans service. They then went into greater detail about four of those countries – Australia being one of them – to make their positive conclusions.
Then in came US president Donald Trump. In a series of Tweets in July he announced to ban trans service in the military because of the burden of both cost and disruption apparently. Yet as it turns out there really wasn’t any disruption to speak of, and the cost of trans medical expenses was less than the cost of dispensing Viagra.
I really didn’t expect Australia to follow president Trump down into the gutter, but of course our conservatives, or really, our regressive members of parliament, delivered. Hastie, Bernardi and Hanson all attacked trans ADF service in the last few days. I’m sure one could easily put the trivial costs of evidence-based treatment for gender dysphoria up against Viagra as the US did, or more useful things like the cost of recruiting and training a soldier or an officer and the experience their years and deployments bring.
On the back of the “respectful debate” about our civil right to marry, weathering the storm of blatant lies told by conservatives and the online dissection of our lives, I had my first public acknowledgement of the organisational progress I had made by being shortlisted in the 2018 Australian LGBTI Awards. That progress has been utterly undermined by the rhetoric of a backwards MP.
Bridget Clinch is a former infantry captain, trans activist and coconvenor of the Queensland Rainbow Greens