Joe Biden is promising to revive former President Barack Obama’s Pentagon transgender policies that require female servicemembers to declare that men are women once the men declare themselves to be transgender.
President Donald Trump erased that policy in 2018, thus allowing female servicemembers to exclude men from their private spaces and from female identity.
“I will flat out just change the law — I will eliminate those Executive Orders,” Biden said October 15, during a televised town hall meeting, when he was questioned by the mother of a woman who said her young child is transgender.
Trump’s 2018 policy does not exclude transgender people from the military. But he requires soldiers to be identified by their biological sex and bars soldiers from changing their official record — their “gender marker” — from male to female or from female to male.
A 2018 Pentagon report set the policy, saying:
Low rates of full sex reassignment surgery and the otherwise wide variation of transition-related treatment, with all the challenges that entails for privacy, fairness, and safety, weigh in favor of maintaining a bright line based on biological [male or female] sex — not gender identity … After all, a person’s biological sex is generally ascertainable through objective means.
The policy was reaffirmed in a September 2020 handbook for service members, titled “Procedures for Service Members and Prospective Applicants for Military Service”:
Transgender Servicemembers … may not obtain a gender marker change or serve in their preferred gender … Continued service is contingent on the Service member not seeking gender transition, the Service member being willing and able to serve in his or her biological sex, and the Service member being able to meet applicable deployability requirements.
…
A commander may employ reasonable accommodations to respect the privacy interests of all Service members.
In general, the transgender ideology says the government should pressure Americans to accept claims by transgender people that they have changed their sex, for example, so that men can compete in women’s sports.
“Trans people are forced into prisons of their birth sex,” tweeted one transgender activist. “The true American dream we all know is pure freedom, no matter who or what you are,” said Paulo Batista, who wants the government to provide an official declaration of male status.
But transgender people comprise far less than 1 percent of the population, and very few men — and servicemembers — who declare they are transgender undergo genital surgery.
“You can’t just pretend that biology can be ignored and someone can change their sex just by saying that ‘I’m something other than what I really am,'” responded Elaine Donnely, founder of the Center for Military Readiness. But, she added, the “biology deniers”:
say that’s exactly where they want to go. They know the military is a venue for social engineering. Everybody has to follow orders — whether you’re a military doctor or a chaplain or a person of a secular faith — in any branch of the service, you must follow orders. And if the orders violate what people know to be true. And their personal values and convictions, and in some cases, their religious convictions, that would be de-moralizing in the fullest sense of the word: “To remove people or separate them from their moral values” would be the dictionary definition of de-moralization.
That kind of [pro-transgender] policy should not be restored, but that is what would happen if Joe Biden and Kamala Harris should win this election.
Forcing female servicemembers to treat men as if they are women is unfair, she said. “To accommodate gender pretenders in private facilities – where privacy is at a premium in the military — and in barracks and washroom facilities … is just not fair.”
Donnelly noted that Trump’s policy does not exclude people who say they are transgender from the service. “The policy does require that if you say you’re transgender, you must still live in your biological sex, and if you’re okay with that, you can serve in the military. That’s why it’s not about the status of transgenders as a class.”
Trump is not raising the issue in the election, she noted: “On the campaign trail, it’s hard to say in a tiny soundbite.”
The Pentagon transgender fight is not about crossdressers in the ranks. It is about whether a gov't agency will declare that each man is a woman when he says so — b/c gov't would forbid public recognition that males & females are different & complementary https://t.co/wx6H9xE1aB
— Neil Munro (@NeilMunroDC) March 1, 2019
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