Pure culture-war catnip, this:
Donald Trump is planning an executive order that would lead to the removal of all transgender members of the US military, defence sources say.
The order could come on his first day back in the White House, January 20. There are believed to be about 15,000 active service personnel who are transgender. They would be medically discharged, which would determine that they were unfit to serve.
It would also lead to a ban on trans people joining the military and would come at a time when almost all branches of the American armed forces are failing to meet recruitment targets.
Regular readers will know, of course, that your correspondent has what Trump supporters call a bad case of full-blown Trump Derangement Syndrome, which means that anything at all that I write about the man which is critical gets written off as just the demented ravings of a lunatic. But for what it’s worth, stories like this one – if it proves accurate – mostly explain my reservations.
There is, I think, widespread societal agreement across western society that men who declare themselves women should not be in women’s prisons. Nor should they be in women’s bathrooms. Nor should children in school be taught that there are a dozen genders, nor should legally changing your gender be a simple matter of filling out a form and obtaining all the sex-based rights of womanhood. Placing restrictions on people’s behaviours in order to protect women and children from predatory men (or in the case of children, experimental medicine) is a straightforward and defensible proposition. These are all positions that I hold, and I think are held by a solid majority of the public, when they think about them.
That is not what the incoming Trump administration proposes to do here. Instead, it’s classic Trump: A flatly discriminatory policy designed to get headlines, polarise debate, invite a legal backlash, and give his enemies a legitimate example of awfulness to point to.
I know of no science or scientific study – perhaps readers can enlighten me – that suggests that a transgender person is any more or less capable of military service than anybody else. It should further be pointed out that the vast majority of roles in the US military are not front-line. We’re talking about drone operators, mechanics, even staff in administrative roles. This is, straightforwardly, a decision by the Trump administration to engage in blanket employment discrimination against transgender people because they are transgender people.
Now, the justification that we are being given is that this is about “exercising wokeness out of the military”. But there’s a few basic problems here.
The first is that the US military apparently has fully 15,000 employees who would be affected by this executive order. That’s a lot of people to sack overnight, and the US military is not like twitter, where Elon Musk did something similar. Many roles are highly specialised and trained. You’re dumping a lot of expertise for the sake of making a point.
This isn’t a recruitment ban, or a slow phasing out of these people in favour of people less conflicted about their gender. It’s reportedly a day-one measure that would create 15,000 vacancies overnight, at a time of global instability. Some experts (perhaps ideologically motivated, perhaps not) have suggested that it might knock US force readiness back by several months, at minimum.
The second point is that transgender people are not some kind of amorphous blob. Indeed, Trump himself has received prominent support from some such people, such as the former Bruce Jenner, who now goes by Caitlin. People are not being targeted here because of their political views, or because they’ve individually supported “wokeness”, or whatever. They’re simply being targeted for identifying a particular way.
The third point is that this is just plain wrong, on a moral level. The Biden administration, of course, did something similar when it sacked 8,000 active-duty service members for their refusal to take a covid vaccine. That was discrimination, and disgraceful, but it was at least based on a refusal of said servicemen and women to obey (an unjust) order. The people being lined up for the boot here have, in many cases, impeccable service records.
The fourth point is that this is just horrible politics. Trump is unlikely to win this fight in the end, as courts will find it very difficult to find a legitimate basis for discrimination on the grounds of being transgender. A private company would not be allowed to behave like this, so Trump will have to find some ex-post-facto justification for why a secretary in the US military is different from a secretary in McDonalds.
It also, more critically, allows the conversation to be shifted away from where the right is on its strongest grounds: the protection of public spaces, bathrooms, classrooms, and other venues from the consequences of transgender ideology. Instead, this is just about “should transgender people be allowed to have jobs”.
I, for one, think transgender people should be allowed to have jobs. I think and suspect you will find this is a widely shared view, even amongst gender-critical people.
This is Trumpism at its worst: Ill-thought out, ill-targeted, and likely to backfire, and targeted directly at his most excitable supporters on social media. It goes in the pile of a long line of similar policies, from the “Muslim ban” (overturned by courts) to the idea that Mexico would pay for a wall, to the very fine people fiasco in his first term. Somebody should talk him out of it.
I expect that last sentence is one we’ll be repeating a lot, over the next few years.