Uncle Sam does not want you

The following is an excerpt from an editorial in the New York Times:

A year after transgender Americans secured the right to defend their nation as equals in the military service, President Donald Trump, in one of his crueler series of tweets, declared on Wednesday that he was banishing them from serving. This was obvious pandering to regressive generals and right-wing zealots as well as an effort to shift the focus from his dysfunctional White House . . .

Transgender troops were quickly defended by Sen. John McCain for “serving honourably today,” and by another Republican, Senator Orrin Hatch, who said, “Transgender people are people, and deserve the best we can do for them.”

. . . In his tweets, Trump contended transgender troops would burden the military with “tremendous medical costs and disruption.” But this is unsubstantiated nonsense. The Obama policy required individuals to “have been stable in their preferred gender” for at least 18 months and to have completed the transition medical treatment they expected to have.

Trump’s rationale is particularly absurd, considering there are estimated to be only about 2,450 transgender troops among 1.3 million active-duty members of the military, according to a RAND Corporation study.

A year ago, the military tradition of treating transgender individuals as perverts seemed at an end when the Obama administration made gender identity a protected category in the Pentagon’s equal opportunity policy. The administration also ended the ban on gay recruits, opened all combat roles to women and named the first openly gay Army secretary.

How much deeper a retreat might Mr. Trump demand from these enlightened policies? . . . So what will be the fate of those already in uniform? Will they be hounded from service? That the White House could not even answer such questions on Wednesday demonstrates how thoughtless and cruel this policy is.