May 9 2025 - 8:00pm
This week, the US Supreme Court delivered a victory to the Trump administration, allowing its policy to ban trans people from the military to stand. A question many still have is: why did they advance this policy in the first place?
Trump unleashed a slew of executive orders on sex and gender the minute he assumed office. They were all written using language that likely offended some liberals’ sensibilities, though the meat of several of them was entirely digestible. Restoring the definition of man and woman to correlate with male and female, or excluding men from women’s sports — we shouldn’t have needed such presidential actions, but because of the efforts of previous liberal administrations, we did. There’s substantial support among Americans for these reasonable policies.
On 27 January, Trump delivered the executive order “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness”. As with the others, some of what was written there was uncontroversial. Service members must be “free of medical conditions or physical defects that may reasonably be expected to require excessive time lost from duty for necessary treatment or hospitalization.” If they have medical or mental health conditions that interfere with their ability to serve, then the military has the right to exclude them. We should accept that not everyone is equipped to defend the country, and advance those who are.
It’s true that a male who has undergone vaginoplasty might have a hard time dilating his (or her?) neovagina in the middle of a war zone, and that some aspects of medical transition likely conflict with military duties. But trans is now an umbrella term that laps up transsexuals who undergo radical surgeries and young people who don items of clothing marketed to the opposite sex. Many of them would have no problem serving. An autogynephilic male might wear some lacy underwear beneath his fatigues, but couldn’t he still wield a rifle or operate a drone? Without knowing what Trump means by trans — without knowing what anybody means by trans — we don’t know to whom these restrictions apply.
Nor do we know how many people the new rules apply to because it’s hard to discern how many trans people serve in the military. Advocates for Trans Equality say almost 20% of all trans people are “active military service members or veterans, which is almost twice the rate of the general population”. Yet a New York Times headline from the end of February read: “Number of Trans Troops Far Lower Than Estimated, Pentagon Figures Show”.
It seems that when, for political reasons, advocates want the trans population to be big, they insist it is. When they want it to be small, they insist it is, too. Of course, the size of the population depends on the definition and boundaries of the population, bringing us back to the problem of what trans is in the first place. The Times talks about gender dysphoria diagnoses, but we’ve heard plenty of times that one need not have GD to be trans, or even to transition medically to be trans. Other than to pick on trans people, or banish them from the barracks, it’s unclear why this was necessary.
And yet, that seems to be precisely what’s happening. The Defense Department has vowed to comb through medical records to find out whom to cast away, and offered 30 days for trans-identified people to desist or detransition. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth wrote on X, “No More Trans @ DoD.” In taking this route, Trump and friends have lost any chance to assert that this is about fairness and reality. They’ve now turned it into an exercise by going through records and purging them. They risk making the most hysterical accusations of trans activists come true.
Even without medical transition, asserting a trans identity “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life,” per the order. “A man’s assertion that he is a woman, and his requirement that others honor this falsehood, is not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.”
As an atheist, who sees gender identity as a religious belief, I disagree. I have no more problem with someone believing in gender identity than I do with them believing in Jesus, Allah, Vishnu, or Zeus. The problem arises when we are compelled to participate in and affirm that belief. I know plenty of people who’ve altered their bodies or changed their names or walk through the world looking like the opposite sex, who don’t ask me to deny reality. Transsexualism and reality don’t have to conflict.
I fear this supposed win for Trump will be a Pyrrhic victory, because if the other orders restored reality, this one fulfills the otherwise paranoid delusion among my fellow liberals that trans people are under assault. Just because you’ve won the right to discriminate against a group of people doesn’t mean that you should.
