Under new White House guidance to the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis will have the authority to decide the service-status of active transgender military personnel.
In effect, this guidance means that the vast majority of transgender personnel will be able to remain in active service.
That’s important because some Republican members of Congress had wanted active service transgender personnel to be separated without regard for their deployability. Such an approach would have been dishonorable to those personnel, and incongruent with the military’s mission to train and deploy maximally-effective forces. Remember, aside from front combat infantry units, genitalia plays a very limited role in defining an individual’s military ability.
Yet separating transgender personnel would also have been nonsensical.
After all, most research estimates suggest that the annual costs involved in providing transgender-specific medical care would be under $10 million. In contrast, the military spends $84 million a year on viagra. Moreover, the deployability issue is hardly unique to transgender personnel. Pregnancy, for example, prevents many thousands of women from deploying with their units each year. We do not separate these personnel, and nor should we.
Ultimately, Mattis gets this. As a Marine officer, Mattis was known for his expectation of aggression, intellect, and moral character from the Marines under his command. He didn’t care if his Marines were male or female, he just wanted them to do well. If a transgender soldier, sailor, marine, or airman can do their job as well as their non-transgender counterpart, they should have the opportunity to serve.
