There will be parades all across the country this Memorial Day commemorating our U.S. service members who died while in the military. But not all service members will be honored for their acts of service, bravery, and patriotism. Back in the day, LGBTQ service members who died while serving our country were either closeted about their sexual orientation and gender identities or were discharged under “honorable conditions,” called “Fraudulent Enlistment.”
Unfortunately, today, not much has changed. If Trump had his way, he would militarily eradicate transgender people from existence. Sadly, on May 6, SCOTUS upheld Trump’s ban on transgender individuals from enlisting in the military. The ban also allows for the discharge of current transgender service members, and on May 15, the Pentagon began mass removal of its transgender troops.
In 2017, Trump’s banning of transgender service members was delivered in his inimitable style of communicating to the American public the order in the form of a tweet:
“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 overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender individuals in the military would entail. Thank you.”
Ironically, Trump’s tweet came on the 69th anniversary of President Harry Truman’s executive order desegregating the U. S. military in 1948. Remember that Trump did not serve in Vietnam. He received five deferments, one of which was a medical diagnosis for bone spurs in his heels.
Trump’s ban primarily focuses on gender dysphoria and gender-affirming surgery as disqualifying conditions. The military policy “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” ended in 2011 and allowed LGBTs to openly serve. Unfortunately, military medical policies continue to discriminate against our transgender military population.
Evidence has shown that the military spends five times more on erectile dysfunction medications such as Viagra and Cialis than it does providing medical services for transgender troops; the bias persists nonetheless. The President’s binary views of gender, along with the perceived excessive cost of gender-reassignment surgery, give rise to his notion that transgender healthcare is a “tremendous medical cost and disruption” to the military.
The privacy rationale is another argument that advocates for the banning of LGBTQ service members in combat. This privacy argument states that all service members have the right to maintain at least partial control over the exposure of their bodies and intimate bodily functions. In other words, heterosexual men deserve the right to control who sees their naked bodies. According to the privacy rationale argument, the “homosexual gaze” in same sex nudity does more than disrupt unit cohesion. Its supposedly predatory nature expresses sexual yearning and desires for unwilling subjects that not only violates the civil rights of heterosexuals, but also causes untoward psychological and emotional trauma to heterosexuals.
While it is believed that the “homosexual gaze” would be the root cause of the disruption of unit cohesion and military capability of our service members, it is actually the macho male heterosexual culture embedded in this milieu that is disruptive. It is in this culture that both sexual harassment and rape of female and LGBTQ service members persists.
However, the 2002 study titled “A Modest Proposal: Privacy as a Flawed Rationale for the Exclusion of Gays and Lesbians from the U.S. Military,” stated that banning LGBTQ service members would not preserve the privacy of its heterosexual service members, but instead it would actually undermine heterosexual privacy because of its systematic invasion to maintain it. And, in order to maintain heterosexual privacy, military inspectors would not only inquire about the sexual behaviors of their service members, but they would also inquire into the sexual behaviors of the spouses, partners, friends, and relatives of their service members.
Military readiness is not a heterosexual cisgender calling. But the military’s belief that service members who are transgender endanger “unit cohesion” only maintains a policy of segregation and fosters a climate of transphobia. It also maintains the military’s history of intolerance, as its argument is eerily reminiscent of the same argument used when the military did not want to integrate its ranks racially, and the racist argument that black service members had to endure.
Our transgender service members are prepared to defend this country with their lives. Transphobia, like racism and sexism, in our armed forces is militarily dangerous because it thwarts the necessary emotional bonding needed amongst service members in battle, and it underutilizes the needed human resources to make a democratic and robust military.
Memorial Day was founded by newly freed African Americans in South Carolina on May 1, 1865. It was just two weeks after the end of the Civil War. The day was to remember and honor the Union’s fallen soldiers. This Memorial Day, let’s remember our unsung transgender service members who have fallen in previous wars and to Trump’s current war on them.
