I look at it this way: as long as it is necessary for the United States to have some kind of military force (and I see no viable alternative) then we are all better off if that military isn’t comprised entirely of straight white neoconservative dudes.
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Donald Trump is demanding a giant military parade in his honor so he can play generalissimo even though he did everything he could to avoid serving. Fuck him straight to hell.
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Sure, I agree; I’m just saying judge him on these actions, not one shared by many other people who simply didn’t want to die in a war the other side of the world.
For many, military service has become the only viable path to education, skills training, a steady paycheck, and perhaps community. That’s not because the military is awesome, it’s because so many have been otherwise abandoned.
The fact that even those discriminated against by the military want to join, shows just how desperate their situation has become.
As with experimental chemotherapy, a horrible option may still be your best option.
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There is nothing honorable about the military. The only way to honorably serve the country is to quit the army. Soldiers are mass murdering child killers for endless war profit and nothing else!
Respectfully, and irrespective of whether one agrees with it, here is why making that point in this discussion is a derail. It distracts from the injustice. The issue at hand is the betrayal and bigoted mistreatment of transgender service-members, a category much larger than the US Army’s combat troops and including everything from Coast Guard personnel who bail out idiots who go sailing in hurricanes to the most active deployed rifleman. By dragging this particular discussion toward the US’s imperialist foreign policy, you distract from the injustice at hand. I know you don’t mean to do that, but that’s the effect nonetheless.
I look at it this way: We don’t need a giant standing army, and the US Founding Fathers didn’t intend for us maintain one, but as long as we have one it should be open to everyone. And that, not the US forging policy, should be the focus of a discussion on transgender members in the military.
I get people are passionate about American imperialism. But making this topic about that is derailing, however well-meaning.
FFS. Look, it’s no secret I think US cops are pretty much a militarized national gang. If I tried to turn a discussion about racism against POC in police forces into a discussion about why they shouldn’t join them anyway, I’d be rightly criticized for changing the subject. So hey, if you’re goal was to derail the discussion, then congratulations. But I don’t think most of you were trying to do that. I think you just felt a burning need to make a discussion about the rights of a marginalized group which happens to be about the US military into a discussion about something tangential that you’d rather talk about.
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The article is so loaded with mentions of how honourable military service is that I felt the need to comment on it. It feels dishonest to me on an outlet that would never use that kind of language in a different context. I trust bb readers to be able to read my comment and take in its point without getting derailed from the main agenda of the article, which I agree with and made clear as much.
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If you grow up in a small, impoverished, rural part of the country; then joining the military is your surest means of escape. And, who would need to escape more than someone who is LBGTQ, etc.?
I know someone who joined the Army just because he didn’t want to wind up married to his cousin in the same backwater town in the Rust Belt where his parents grew up. It wasn’t until after he signed commitment papers that the other recruits told him about the G.I. bill. He spent Gulf War I in Germany soldering connections for communications satellites. He’s now an Electrical Engineer.
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I would agree if Trump didn’t then go on to become president of the USA where he is expected to send troops places which will cost them their lives.
There are cases where you CAN single a person out with an insult that would be wrong to apply to everyone.
(ETA, if he had run on a campaign of “no draft, ever” or even hinted that it was something he supported, I would agree with you totally.)
ETA SOME MORE: I realize this is a really sticky situation, and you should never use an insult or slur against a person that is an insult against EVERYONE similar, but in this one case I do think the extraordinary circumstances make it applicable. President Trump displays such a hypocritical nature in this that calling him a “chicken shit” for dodging the draft 100% does not apply to anyone else who has done so.
I totally accept that others may find this wrong, and I think that’s a fair conclusion, but not the one I reached in this particular circumstance.
Donald Trump really brings out the worst of me in a lot of ways.
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Is there really that much of a discussion here, though? We seem to have a basically unanimous consensus on “bigotry against transfolk is unacceptable, Trump is scum, this is horrid”.
Given that, and given that those points have already been repeatedly made in the thread, is it seriously problematic if the thread now addresses some of the related issues?
It’s not an out-of-nowhere question from @SqualusAcanthias. These sorts of IDpol vs larger context debates have been happening in many places online (google “hire more women prison guards!”); it’s a recurring site of unresolved left/liberal tension.
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I probably overacted a little. I took it a little personally because I have a close transwoman friend who’s a retired marine. I do feel like there are certain topics that take over any discussion they’re tangentially related to. Maybe it’s because there isn’t enough discussion of those topics re themselves. Frankly, we probably need more discussion dedicated to how we frame things like military service.
But after @SqualusAcanthias brought it up, 13 of the 21 comments (including mine) were about why LGTBQ persons would or should want to join the military, not about whether they should be allowed and why the Alt-Reich are goosestepping fascists cloaking their bigotry in executive orders. And yes, of course most Boingers are going to agree they should be allowed to serve. But telling someone being betrayed by their country because of their orientation or identity that they’re better off anyway is really really problematic.
That said, this will now be 14 comments on this, and I’ve said my piece so I’m dropping it since I don’t want to contribute to the derail.
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Whether they are invited or not, an LGBT Veterans contingent should march in that stupid-ass parade of his.
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I’m not terribly sure why I joined, but I know why I stayed. I served a nation that I believed in and wanted to be proud of. I was involved in things which made the world a better place.
After more than 20 years of service, I can say that I played a part in something which was mostly good, even if some of the things that happened were bad.
I have no regrets about my service, and I can say that my morals were never compromised.
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That’s not what I said at all. If anything, I said that everyone, no matter the gender, who has to join the military in order to acquire benefits that should be matters of course is being betrayed by their country.
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I don’t think there’s anything pro-war about calling out warhawk draft dodgers. It’s equivalent to calling out vocal homophobes who are having gay sex on the down low. It’s about hypocrisy more than anything else.
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Then again, writing, “Recently fired Trump official [name here]” has a decent chance of being true by the time someone actually reads it. You just got unlucky.
I don’t think this is true. I’ve seen sentiment like this on BB before. A lot of Americans really do value the service of the people in their military and hold people who serve in high regard, even as they wish the military was smaller and wish that the US would stop trying to play world police.
I’m sorry, but nobody should want to serve in the armed forces of the US of A. No patriots, be they white, heterosexual, male, female, black, brown, gay, trans. Nobody.
Don’t ask, don’t tell?
DON’T GO!!! DON’T KILL!!!
Don’t get me wrong, I’m absolutely in favour of equal rights for gay and trans people, in every respect.
There’s just this: Do I really think the world will be a better place if trans people are also lovingly allowed to kill, burn, maim and slash innocent civilans in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Libya? I don’t think so. None of these wars did any good at all to the regions who suffered them. The military force of the US of A has, as it has been deployed since, well, forever (including Vietnam) been completely useless in terms of positive political results, but yes, a lot of innocent people has died.
I don’t want trans people to be in the army, I want everybody else to leave it. Like now.
You’re probably right about that and it’s a weird, schizophrenic way to look at things. If you actually support the kind of foreign policy the US has pursued for the last 70 years, then by all means, support the military and talk about how honourable of an occupation it is to serve in it.
But if you don’t, then I just don’t get that kind of attitude. The way the US exploits their poor as cannon fodder for their meddlesome foreign policy is no different to me from the way it exploits them in the privatised prison system, and I don’t see any liberals glorifying that.
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I don’t think there’s anything weird about being against war, against the leaders who start wars, but supportive of the people who fight in the wars. In the analogy to privatized prison, I’d say that this is like being sympathetic to the prisoners.
Side note: I’m not infantilizing soldiers here, but I do think we basically abuse them as a society. We take people who have a drive to defend others and drastically underpay and mistreat them because we know we’ll have volunteers anyway. Sort of like how we underpay and mistreat teachers, nurses and other “caring” professions. Obviously in the US, though, this is compounded by the healthcare issue which is just grotesque.
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