President Donald Trump this week gets a Pentagon study which may recommend the government endorse the transgender ideology, despite his August directive to Pentagon officials.
The core claim of the transgender ideology is that the government should allow people to freely switch their legal sex to match their feelings of “gender identity,” regardless of their biology. If Trump accepts any recommendation which accepts that fundamental demand, progressive activist groups will quickly cite the Pentagon’s endorsement when asking judges to impose “transgender rights” on Americans and their children.
In practice, the transgender ideology requires women to silently accept men who “identify” as female in women’s bathrooms, showers, and sports clubs, and it requires parents to stand aside when their children decide to begin a lifetime of risky and self-sterilizing taxpayer-funded medical treatments to help them pretend they are members of the opposite sex.
The ideology is rapidly gaining power, aided by huge donations from wealthy individuals and medical companies. In Ohio, for example, in February, a judge forced parents of a teenage girl to give up custody so she can begin a lifetime of drug treatments and surgery that will allow her to appear as a male. Also, officials in New York and various universities have threatened to penalize people who do not refer to men as if they are women, and several judges have declared that Pentagon officials must accept recruits who want to change their sex.
There are some hints that Defense Secretary Jim Mattis will try to dodge the issue by endorsing the transgender ideology while also excluding recruits who cannot deploy — such as people who are trying to change their sex via surgery and drugs.
“This is a deployable military,” Mattis said, according to USA Today. “It’s a lethal military that aligns with our allies and partners. If you can’t go overseas in your combat load — carry a combat load, then obviously, someone else has got to go. I want this spread fairly and equitably across the force.”
If Mattis pushes that dodge, he and his successors will face a series pro-transgender lawsuits and judges demanding that Pentagon officials actually implement their transgender endorsement by fully accepting recruits and soldiers who declare they have an opposite-sex “gender identity.”
If Trump accepts a pro-transgender policy at the Pentagon, he also gives up a popular and emotional issue that could help the GOP in the 2018 elections.
“I’m sure the President will carefully consider the information [in Mattis’ review] and if it is more one-sided that it ought to be, I’m sure he can order more information,” said Elaine Donnelly at the Center for Military Readiness. “Something as important as this is should be carefully considered.”
Trump has already made clear he opposes the transgender ideology and instead supports the nation’s two-sex society of equal, different and complementary men and women.
His appointees at the departments of justice and education have discarded controversial pro-transgender policies imposed by deputies working for former President Barack Obama. After the 2016 elections, Obama admitted his pro-transgender policies were so unpopular that they helped Trump beat Hillary Clinton.
In August, Trump directed the Pentagon to review Obama’s pro-transgender policies in the Pentagon:
In my judgment, the previous Administration failed to identify a sufficient basis to conclude that terminating the Departments’ longstanding policy and practice would not hinder military effectiveness and lethality, disrupt unit cohesion, or tax military resources, and there remain meaningful concerns that further study is needed to ensure that continued implementation of last year’s policy change would not have those negative effects …
I am directing the Secretary of Defense, and the Secretary of Homeland Security with respect to the U.S. Coast Guard, to return to the longstanding policy and practice on military service by transgender individuals that was in place prior to June 2016 until such time as a sufficient basis exists upon which to conclude that terminating that policy and practice would not have the negative effects discussed above.
Trump directed Pentagon officials to review the issue, and report back, ordering officials:
shall submit to me a plan for implementing both the general policy set forth in section 1(b) of this memorandum and the specific directives set forth in section 2 of this memorandum. The implementation plan shall adhere to the determinations of the Secretary of Defense, made in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security, as to what steps are appropriate and consistent with military effectiveness and lethality, budgetary constraints, and applicable law.
The problem is that Mattis delegated the task of preparing the review to an official who developed Obama’s pro-transgender rules, said Donnelly.
The official, Anthony Kurta, has been the Pentagon’s personnel chief. But, said Donnelly, he has a long record of using the military to promote domestic social agendas, including government support for new legal rights for gays and for people who want to switch sex.
Under Kurta’s Obama-era policy, for example, female soldiers were ordered to give “dignity and respect” to transsexual men who join them in their shared shower rooms, according to training manuals leaked by soldiers in a mandatory class. But this “dignity and respect” was to be a one-way street, according to the training slides, which were developed by officials working for Obama. “Transgender Soldiers are not required or expected to modify or adjust their behavior based on the fact that they do not ‘match’ other Soldiers,” according to the slides, which were first leaked by TheFederalist.com:
Kurta may have finished the Trump review even before Christmas, ensuring that his Trump-appointed Pentagon personnel manager never gets a look, said Donnelly.
Opponents of the transgender ideology were apparently excluded from Kurta’s review, said Donnelly. “We don’t know who is on the panel, what kind of background they have, and we don’t know what kind of outside groups were invited in,” Donnelly said. “I don’t know anyone who has been invited to advise this panel of experts, although many of us have made our views known.”
“We are very concerned the President will not get the full range of information required to make a sound decision … and will only be exposed to one side,” said Donnelly. A process run by Kurta “is not the full and objective review that many of us expected … they should have appointed someone more objective.”
Robert Wilkie is the new undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, and Kurta has been nominated to oversee personnel policies under Wilkie, who is a former top staffer for GOP Sen. Thom Tillis.
Multiple polls show that most Americans wish to help and comfort people who think they are a member of the opposite sex but they also reject the transgender ideology’s claim that a person’s sex is determined by their feeling of “gender identity,” not by their biology.
Activists who support the transgender ideology claim that 0.35 percent of Americans are transgender. A study of the 2010 Census reported that only 1-in-2,300 adult Americans had changed their name from one sex to the other.
The progressive push to bend Americans’ attitudes and their male-and-female civic society around the idea of “gender” has already attacked and cracked popular social rules for how Americans handle the many charming differences between complementary men and women.
These pro-gender claims have an impact on different-sex bathrooms, shelters for battered women, sports leagues for girls, hiking groups for boys, K-12 curricula, university speech codes, religious freedoms, free speech, the social status of women, parents’ rights in childrearing, practices to help teenagers, women’s expectations of beauty, culture and civic society, scientific research, prison safety, civic ceremonies, school rules, men’s sense of masculinity, law enforcement, and children’s sexual privacy.