RE: Former Green Beret Response to Kristen Beck (Transgender Former SEAL)
Here's the problem with what you're saying. Those issues you bring up should be selected for through the fire that is the training. Trump made the decree that Trans are banned. Trains is an identity, not an action. If a person identifies as trans but never has the intention to undergo surgery, that person would still be banned. Also, nothing about this has any bearing on who has to pay for the surgery. Quite frankly I don't think that tax dollars should go to the procedure, I see it as an elective surgery/non essential surgery / the same way replacing a dead front tooth is considered by insurance to be elective - it sucks and you don't present yourself in the way you would like, but it's not going to directly cause you harm not to have it done.
Introducing additional extra-ordinary (in the specific definition of that phrase) complications to an already challenging situation is a waste of limited resources (time, manpower, energy). What would be the added benefit, aside from introducing a demographic that is <0.01% of the available population for the sake of introducing them?
Not according to the doctors who qualify/disqualify based on medical assessments. There are only two genders in the military and that is based on objective medical observation, genitalia, and chromosome make-up
If they don't say so during the enlistment process, how would it be known? Unless you're arguing for the "Male/Female" question as part of the enlistment process being eliminated? What would the medical assessments be based on? Choice, genitalia, chromosomes... or other?
Agreed
Actually, a dead front tooth could impair someones mission readiness, depending on the medical assessment
Comparing a dead tooth to a serious medical procedure that removes genitals is a stretch, especially when one has long-lasting requirements to maintain care (based on my research)
A few quick points - by going into the substantice details regarding the how, you are going into way more detail than what the president gave in his statement. This is similar to the "Muslim Ban" Trump kept repeating that it was a Muslim ban, but in reality it was increased scrutiny from a handful of countries. But on the same day as the AG argues the finer points on this, Trump doubles down and declares that it is in fact a Muslim ban.
Obviously there are going to be ways to get around this for a particularly ardent individual but by his statement, Trump is prohibiting a class of people from an entire sector of government. to me, it is irrelevant that this is likely to be walked back in its application, the President of the United States issued a degree that Trans people are no longer permitted to serve in the military.
Even taking the polarizing aspects of this out of the equation, the fact clearly remains that a group who Trump Championed and used his support of as an attack on his opponent, the LGBT community, he has now betrayed that community with this action. There is no way around that.
To my point about a tooth, first, certainly didn't mean that in a military context, I meant that from an insurance perspective and how they differentiate between necessary and elective surgery. I can tell you from personal experience that correcting a dead miscolored tooth is not covered by dental insurance because it is deemed as elective. The reason I included this was to innoculate my characterization of a gender surgery as elective by grounding it in an objective reality of insurance policy, to demonstrate how high that bar can be.