President Trump Needs to Take the Next Step Regarding Military Transgenders

Last Wednesday, President Donald Trump announced that he would discontinue administrative directives ordering the armed forces to accommodate transgenders in the military.

Our friend Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness, here explains what the next steps are to accomplish the President’s directive:

“The Center for Military Readiness applauds President Trump for showing decisive leadership in announcing his intent to halt a massive social experiment in the armed forces. This action is necessary because Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, wrongly ordered the military to assume the risks of retaining and recruiting a cohort of persons who are suffering from gender dysphoria—a psychological condition that involves confusion about gender identity.

President Donald Trump had every right and responsibility to announce an end to his predecessor’s most extreme imposition of political correctness in our military.

The military health system (MHS) is designed to be a national security force multiplier. It should not be misused to indulge transgender demands and theories that are contradicted by biological realities, science and common sense. Expensive life-long hormone treatments and irreversible surgeries associated with gender dysphoria would negatively affect personal deployability and mission readiness, without resolving underlying psychological problems, including high risks of suicide.

The next step is to formalize what the commander-in-chief announced yesterday. President Trump or the Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, should formally revoke expendable Obama-era administrative directives, which were written in consultation with LGBT activist groups and like-minded, always-pro LGBT contractors such as RAND.

To encourage this policy change, the Center for Military Readiness recently released a 27-page CMR Special Report, which identifies and analyzes 15 Defense Department and military service directives that former Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and other Pentagon officials imposed on our military, starting in 2015:

• Department of Defense & Military Services Should Revoke Problematic Transgender Policy Directives and Instructions
• Executive Summary

These 15 directives, instructions and mandatory, time-wasting training programs force the military to retain and recruit persons with a psychological condition that renders them non-deployable for long periods of time. All of them reflect the pervasive groupthink and delusional ideology that has permeated Pentagon plans for transgenders in our military.

President Trump has chosen to stand by troops who were betrayed by the Obama Administration. These include:

• Intellectually honest servicemembers who reject the notion that gender is “assigned” at birth and can be changed and the irrational belief that regardless of unchanging human DNA, revisions in bureaucratic “gender markers” really can transform a man into a woman or a woman into a man.
• Pro-defense taxpayers and military leaders who object to unlimited expenditures for lifetime hormone treatments and sometimes irreversible surgeries. (Transgender advocates demand special status for recruits seeking lifetime medical benefits despite deployability problems. They also demand coverage for veterans in an already overloaded system, and for family dependents, including minor children).
• Military women who object to training programs telling them that they must accept infringements on their personal privacy, including unclothed biological males, in facilities and conditions of forced intimacy.
• Military commanders, doctors and nurses who have been ordered to approve, participate in or perform procedures that violate medical ethics or sincerely-held personal or religious convictions.
• Thousands of troops in all branches of the service who are demoralized by orders to accept additional burdens when side effects from transgender treatments and surgeries negatively affect combat deployability and readiness. These personnel will be harmed by DoD directives authorizing months-long absences for “real life experience” (RLE), allowing confused persons to try out life as a person of the opposite sex.
• Traditional American volunteers who object to the establishment of a network of remote “Service Central Coordination Cells” (SCCCs) allowing LGBT consultants to politicize the Military Health System.
• Subordinates in all ranks and branches of the service who no longer trust military leaders who endorse medical delusions.
• Veterans who object to the diversion of scarce VA resources in pursuit of politically-correct social agendas that are not consistent with sound priorities in the military.

President Trump has re-established vertical cohesion, which is essential for combat readiness. It is important to note that the Army, Air Force and Marine Corps initially requested a delay of at least two years to assess costs and consequences of recruiting transgenders into the armed forces.

It appears that President Trump listened to these military leaders and took their concerns seriously.

Congressional leaders who failed to call or ask for hearings on this important issue should not complain about being taken by surprise. They should know that there are a number of psychological conditions that make a person ineligible to serve, such as anorexia nervosa, claustrophobia, sleep-walking and chronic sea- or air-sickness.

President Trump’s announcement is consistent with what Defense Secretary James Mattis said at his confirmation hearing: In the making of military personnel policies, mission readiness and combat lethality will be paramount.” {eoa}

This article was originally published at ConservativeHQ.com. Used with permission.