Trump: Thanks for your service but no thanks

President Trump’s tweeted-out order to ban transgender people from military service is disgraceful on a human and practical level.

You have to figure trans people are already pretty brave to navigate the world in general, given the hate they deal with. Isn’t that kind of bravery a quality we need in our soldiers? Transgender men and women have already been serving their country, even before the ban on openness lifted last year. The arrogance of that man to announce “Thanks for your service but no thanks” via a GD smart phone. Can you imagine giving years of service and now being in limbo, not knowing if you’ll be discharged? 

It’s stupid in general to lay a big blanket of judgment over an entire group of people and say, “People like you can’t do X job.” At one time, the military thought women couldn’t serve in active duty, treating women as a monolith rather than looking at their actual capabilities, and that wasn’t fair. Further back, black soldiers were segregated from whites, and that wasn’t fair either. We resolved those short-sighted policies but what good does it do to take this step backwards and say transgender people are no longer able to serve? How does it make our country safer to drive competent people out of our armed forces? If people, transgender and otherwise, can serve, then they should be welcome to serve. We need to judge people’s capabilities to do a job on actual capabilities and not on immutable identity.

This decision is also dumb on a practical level. Trump says this is driven by medical costs that are unique to trans people but those costs are a drop in a very large ocean of what we spend on the military. So we’re each going to get an extra nickel back in taxes while dismissing a bunch of competent people from the military? If anyone is actually outraged at their tax money going to transgender soldiers, they should remember that the trans soldiers also pay taxes for things that benefit the outraged among us.

At least the Joint Chiefs themselves are saying they “will continue to treat all of our personnel with respect” and not abide by Trump’s tweet unless there is something more formal. That’s heartening.

Whether or not the transgender ban really takes effect, this should put the lie to the idea that Trump would support LGBTQ people. Some people in our community, like dimwitted Caitlyn Jenner, actually bought that BS before the election. Most of us were not distracted by Trump waving a rainbow flag in our faces and saying the acronym “LGBTQ” like he was learning to read for the first time.

Put aside the rhetoric and look at the administration’s actual record on LGBTQ issues. We have this cruelly-announced military ban. We have a vice president who championed conversion therapy for gay kids and introduced a law in Indiana protecting anti-gay discrimination for businesses. We have an attorney general arguing that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act does not protect gay people from being fired solely due to their sexual orientation. We have a secretary of education who, faced with a choice of enforcing the protection of transgender children in schools, decided not to protect these kids. We have a new Supreme Court justice who has already voted against listing the names of gay parents on the birth certificates of adopted kids. This is six months in.

Non-LGBTQ people had reasons for voting for Trump and I understand some of that. But I never understood and will never understand gays for Trump. Set aside the rainbow flag-waving and read what was in the Republican party’s platform:

On marriage equality: “We condemn the Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Windsor, which wrongly removed the ability of Congress to define marriage policy in federal law. We also condemn the Supreme Court’s lawless ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, which in the words of the late Justice Antonin Scalia, was a ‘judicial Putsch’ — full of ‘silly extravagances’… For that reason, as explained elsewhere in this platform, we do not accept the Supreme Court’s redefinition of marriage and we urge its reversal, whether through judicial reconsideration or a constitutional amendment returning control over marriage to the states.”

So they would reverse something gay people fought for for decades, something important to the dignity of many people. That’s one example. The party also endorses the First Amendment Defense Act, which could justify businesses not serving gay people, and heavily implies an opposition to adoption by gay people.

All the evidence was right there: Trump’s party wrote it down for anybody to read online. Evidently some gay people didn’t and voted against their own interests, and I will never understand it. They told you who they are but you didn’t listen.