Pentagon chief James Mattis is urging President Donald Trump to embrace the revolutionary political claim that every person’s legal sex is determined by their feelings of “gender identity,” not by science or biology, according to the Washington Post.
The Washington Post‘s report cites two officials, and it hides the fundamental legal and ideological conflicts created nationwide by the transgender push, and instead focuses on anecdotal and personal stories about military service, saying:
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is expected to propose to President Trump that transgender members of the U.S. military be allowed to continue serving despite the president’s call last summer for a ban on all transgender service members, according to two U.S. officials with knowledge of the issue …
Marine Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff …. testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee last fall, said transgender troops already in the military have served with honor.
“I believe any individual who meets the physical and mental standards, and is worldwide deployable and is currently serving, should be afforded the opportunity to continue to serve,” he said.
But any endorsement of the transgender claim would have a huge national impact beyond the Department of Defense and its vast school system. For example, Trump’s Department of Education has rejected the pro-transgender policies set in place by former President Barack Obama, which would have imposed the transgender ideology on schools nationwide. If the Pentagon accept the transgender ideology, lawyers for the well-funded transgender movement will ask judges to impose “transgender rights” on schools from coast to coast.
Far-left judges may already have influenced Mattis’ agreement to endorse the transgender ideology. A February 22 Fox News report said Mattis “did not want to go against recent federal court orders which ruled Trump’s proposed ban on transgender people serving in the military is unlawful.”
The transgender ideology is deeply unpopular, especially among women and parents. In practice, the transgender ideology requires women to silently accept men who “identify” as female in women’s bathrooms, showers, and sports clubs. It also requires parents to stand aside when their children decide to begin a lifetime of risky and self-sterilizing medical treatments to help them pretend they are members of the opposite sex.
Obama admitted after the 2016 election that his transgender push helped Trump, who opposed the policy during the 2016 election.
There are clearly, though, failures on our part to give people in rural areas or in exurban areas, a sense day-to-day that we’re fighting for them or connected to them.
Some of it is the prism through which they’re seeing the political debate take place. They may know less about the work that my administration did on trying to promote collective bargaining or overtime rules. But they know a lot about the controversy around transgender bathrooms because it’s more controversial, it attracts more attention.
If Trump accepts’s Mattis’s pro-transgender policy, he will not be able to use the emotional, turnout-boosting issue in 2018 or 2020 — even as transgender activists push judges to impose pro-transgender policies in schools around the country.
The transgender endorsement is also bad for the military, according to a February 23 statement from Elaine Donnelly at the Center for Military Readiness:
The Defense Secretary’s trial balloon, if accurately described, will not fly. Such a plan would be unworkable and unfaithful to orders that President Donald Trump has every right to issue. As explained in this new article, such a plan also would be inconsistent with commitments already made during the 2016 election campaign and in the first year of the Administration.
The core claim of the transgender ideology is that the government must help the very small percentage of people who claim have feelings of opposite-sex “gender identity.” The help would change laws to allow people — including children and teenagers – to freely switch their legal sex, back and forth, regardless of their biology or other Americans’ concerns.
Transgender activists expect the government to suppress public and civic opposition to their gender-beats-biology claim by creating “transgender rights” and enforcing “hate crimes” legislation. This suppression is intended to force Americans to give up their evolved social and civic rules which help males and females compete and prosper in a two-sex society of equal, different and complementary men and women, girls and boys.
Under Obama, Pentagon officials allowed any soldier to change their “gender marker” in their personnel files, without regard to their willingness to undergo cosmetic surgery — and officials also ordered other soldiers to believe the sex-switching claim, regardless of science and biology. For example, military instructions say female soldiers must give “dignity and respect” to sexually intact men who join them in their shared shower rooms. But this “dignity and respect” is a one-way street, according to the training slides. “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.
In 2017, Trump used his Twitter account and subsequent instructions to order Mattis to end the Obama policy and then report back with new policies in 2018.
But Mattis put the Obama policies on hold and delegated the requested study to the Obama official –Anthony Kurta — who developed the pro-transgender policy in 2016.
Transgender activists also demand taxpayers fund the expensive and life-long medical services which they need to appear like a member of the opposite sex. These free, but irreversible, risky, mutilating and sterilizing medical services should also be provided to children and teenagers, regardless of parents’ wishes, says transgender activists.
Despite the huge expense, conflict, and damage to young people, the gender 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.
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.”
Activists who support the transgender ideology claim that 0.35 percent of Americans are transgender. But 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 many of the popular social rules which help Americans manage the cooperation and competition among and between complementary, different and equal 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.