Friday on the House floor, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) compared the U.S. military offering gender reassignment surgery to enlistees and those transgender troops being deployed to the battlefield to the 16th century Ottoman Empire castrating their captives.eunuchs.
These eunuchs according to King did not perform on the battlefield because they were no longer able to produce testosterone, which King argued might happen to gender reassignees in the U.S. military.
Remarks as follows:
When the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Gohmert, talks about how history will be written one day, this isn’t a civilization killer, but an indication of a civilization killer. I think of the circumstances in a little bit older history, back in the 16th century and 17th century when the Ottoman Empire and the Muslim armies were sweeping across the countryside, and whoever they captured, they pressed them into slavery. And when they pressed them into slavery they wanted to have their crack troops, and their crack troops were called Janissaries.
What they did in order to keep them from reproducing was that they did reassignment surgery on those slaves that they captured that they had put into their Janissaries troops. And that reassignment surgery was they took them from being a virile reproductive male to being eunuchs. They were suitable to work in the harem, but they found out when to put them out in the field to do battle against the enemy, that they didn’t have the testosterone to take on the fight. And so over a period of time, a generation or two, they finally realized, I guess we are going to have to stop turning these men into eunuchs if we are going to have them as a fighting machine.
That’s the Janissaries. And the old history through that is replete with narrative after narrative of them taking out the knife and actually cutting these atomically complete men flush. Some would die, and some would live, but none of them had the will to fight. So they decided they were going to keep anatomically complete men. Men that were producing testosterone in their crack Janissaries troops where they fought well. That’s a lesson from the Ottoman military from two, three, four hundred years ago, and today we are thinking that we are going to make the military better while people lining up at the recruitment center who have planned that they want to do sexual reassignment surgery, know that it is expensive and just believe if I can get into the Navy, Army, Air Force and Marines, maybe become a Navy Seal and submit to sexual reassignment surgery and go from a man to a woman.
It doesn’t look women will be going into men after they go through seal training. I don’t think that’s going to happen. But there is no way this enhances the capabilities of our military. There is no way this enhances the morale of our military. And you will never see a platoon that is made up of all the folks that are likely to line up to sign into our military. This policy clearly, if enacted and advertised, is a neon sign for people who want to have sexual reassignment surgery. They will line up at the recruitment office. They’ll be going into the military. And the military will say we had to turn away this one because he was too heavy or had flat feet or a bad eye or congenital defect of one kind or another. But if they don’t have those and want sexual reassignment surgery, we’ll cut them up and remake them into something different, to the tune of 3.9 billion dollars over a ten-year period. And put them off in the recovery room for two years before we can put them to work and use them. And by the way, they are likely to be discharged to go back into society if their only purpose was to get the free surgery.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.