Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/10/30/trumps-ban-on-openly-transge.html
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Just out of interest, what percentage of the acts Trump has signed haven’t been shot down in flames the moment they get anywhere near any sort of legal test?
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His repeal of clean air and water protections are still standing
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As his stacking of the judiciary.
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I was hoping to say something cutting and witty about that, but I just read through some of the other 50 or so acts he’s signed and, upon discovering that one of them establishes a new corporation called “The Global War on Terror Memorial Foundation”, my brain has BSOD’d.
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So it’s more of a policy against pre-operative transsexuals among the transgender troops than a policy against transgender troops more generally. Thank the gods for small favors, I suppose, but it will be nice when the institutional bigotry is simply a memory.
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Oh dear heaven, I sure fuckin’ hope so.
This reality denying clusterfuck has already been going on too long already.
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This is still going to possibly screw me. I’m a civilian working for the DoD, and transgender. I pushed ahead to get bottom surgery this year, which requires two surgeries. I got it mostly covered by the DoD. I was told by OPM (our HR department) to be prepared to lose my medical coverage. Since in this ruling, they don’t feel they have standing to fight the ban on medical care, I might lose access to coverage for my testosterone. My medical coverage follows the DoD’s.
For this, I am going to send Trump a big ass dick pick, and thank him for buying me a new dick this year. It won’t help, but it sure will make me feel better.
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But today’s decision doesn’t undo Trump’s ban on the military paying for gender-related surgery.
Wasn’t the military itself pushing for this? If the DoD and the Trump administration see eye to eye on this one, it might be really hard to fight back.
Be sure to cc: Pence
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Correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s my impression not all trans people seek gender reassignment surgery. Did I miss the memo?
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Definitely!
Reminds me of this one Joe Frank radio-skit wherein a sleazy, dishonest, incompetent mayor diverts city funds to throwing a birthday party for a statue rather than using the funds to help clean a polluted lake.
No, not really. A 2016 report by the Rand Corporation, which was commissioned by the Pentagon, states that transgender members of the armed forces would not compromise military readiness, ability to deploy or require a significant increase in health care costs.
From the military perspective I think the biggest problem with the ban wasn’t a human rights one, it was a, “What are we going to do with transgender troops who are already deployed overseas?” It was a logistical nightmare that was probably going to cost more than all those gender reassignment surgeries. No longer paying for the surgeries but keeping the people they have is a best-of-all worlds from a this-quarter-focused cost-saving perspective.
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“No longer paying for the surgeries but keeping the people they have is a best-of-all worlds from a this-quarter-focused cost-saving perspective.”
“The best” minus the costs of suicides, self harm, suffering and lost productivity of dysphoric transsexual folks in the military denied of the best standards of medical care…
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I think that’s all supposed to happen next quarter.
(For clarity, I was attempting to decry what I think of as lack of empathy and shortsightedness of military leaders who, by agreeing to take away these rights, show that they were never concerned about people, but about some administrative metric)
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Yes. Your contributions on BB make me believe you are a compassionate individual. 
Just wanting to sharpen an incisive frame against the kind of metric you were pointing out.
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Except that we already had some kind of objective study of cost feasability by the Rand Corporation. Their report said that the cost to the military for keeping trans troops was rather insignificant. Plus most top military leaders did not want the ban in the first place. Choosing to craft their own protocols on the subject without the drawback of tossing out the careers of 12,000 or so people they have paid good money to train, equip and pay. The Coast Guard Commandant flat out told Trump to go f–k himself on the issue.
The telling feature of this fustercluck was when Trump declared that he consulted with the military on the issue and their immediate response was , “Um, no you didn’t.”
Make no mistake here, the sole purpose of this was to appeal to the anti-LGBT bible thumpers in an effort of political horsetrading. He would do that bit of discrimination for them (against a group which is rather small and easy to pick on) in exchange those bible thumping loonies would endorse something stupid like the (will never be built) Mexico Wall
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