Rooting for the Skinny Repeal** here...
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We in the military "won't go back", Ms. Manning insists...
No kidding, lady. Sadly, it's not the confused MtF's who enlisted and who publicly stated their own military isolation and gender dysphoria struggles led to their actions,* who will pay the price. (The lady's sentence was commuted.)
It's the Female to Male (FtM) soldiers, like this one in the Minnesota National Guard, who kept their heads down and were serving honorably, who will likely be affected. I can't imagine many MtF's volunteering to serve. They only seem to identify as females either during, or after, their military service. Nothing wrong with that (for the military) necessarily, but the policy Trump is imposing now makes sense until we can better understand how gender dysphoria not yet treated affects the mind.
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* From "The Long and Lonely Road of Chelsea Manning":
On rare reprieves from the SCIF, Manning accompanied senior officers to meetings with the Iraqi military and the Iraqi federal police, sit-downs that further entrenched her disillusionment.
“There would be these tea sessions, where you’ve got the Iraqi federal police in their blue uniforms, you’ve got Iraqi Army in, like, the old chocolate-chip camouflage and the Americans in our smeared green digital camouflage,” Manning said — everyone speaking in different languages, frequently at cross-purposes. “I’d come in thinking things would be black and white. They weren’t.”
Manning told me she heard the name WikiLeaks for the first time in 2008, at a computer security training course at Fort Huachuca. By the end of 2009, she had started logging on to internet relay chat conversations devoted to the site. (I.R.C., a semisecure protocol, was then the preferred method of communication for hackers.)
For good reason, it turns out in retrospect.Initially, she was an observer: She was intrigued by the work that Julian Assange and his team were doing, if not quite ready to endorse their argument for total transparency. She told me that she believed then, and believes now, that “there are plenty of things that should be kept secret.” “Let’s protect sensitive sources. Let’s protect troop movements. Let’s protect nuclear information. Let’s not hide missteps. Let’s not hide misguided policies. Let’s not hide history. Let’s not hide who we are and what we are doing.”She was edging closer to acting but said nothing about the I.R.C. channel to her friends at F.O.B. Hammer, nor about her own personal tumult. She was now fighting to keep what amounted to two life-altering secrets. She couldn’t discuss her identity openly: The “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was still in effect, and it would be years before transgender people were allowed to openly enlist.
Remember: What a liberal Commander-in-Chief can giveth, a conservative Commander-in-Chief can taketh away...
ADDED: A lot of the media is calling Trump a hypocrite today for promising, while campaigning, to "protect" GBLT citizens. But people, please don't trust the media. Listen to the FULL clips... most of the endings to his promises left out the rest of the statement.
Again and again, candidate Trump promised to "protect" GBLTQ people from the foreign ideologies that call for the deaths of gay people. Hillary Clinton, according to candidate Trump, would open the doors to those fleeing foreign wars, many of whom practice a religion that indeed believes that gay people are not equal citizens, but worthy of death in their old homelands.
Trump made a promise that such a mentality would not take hold in our shared America. He NEVER promised to uphold Obama's personal directives on transgenders in the military, or that school children had the right to use the bathroom of the opposite gender. All of the people who call Trump a hypocrite here are only twisting his words and promises, hearing only what they wanted to hear.
Our Commander-in-Chief has a bigger role to play than promising to integrate cisgender (sic) and transgender troops. That was President Obama's big accomplishment -- in his last year -- while the undeclared wars appear to have received less of his attentions.
Already, President Trump has stopped arming the military rebels who threaten to overthrow Syria's leader. It appears President Trump, and all the voters who helped elect him, learned lessons from the costs and results of our military follies in Iraq and Libya.
Enough about the transgender troops. Like in 1948, these decisions are best not made in wartime. Again, what one president "giveth", the next can taketh away... Smart soldiers, and their lawyers, always understood that. Just like with the Paris climate accord, people apparently were deceived in putting their complete faith in President Obama's temporary powers.
Don't get fooled again?
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* UPDATED: Why I support the Skinny bill:
The framers of the Constitution never envisioned granting Congress the power to force people to buy a privately delivered financial service. The Constitution never would have been ratified had they tried.
But even if you’re the type to roll your eyes at constitutional arguments, there are important economic reasons to oppose Obamacare’s mandate. Gross premiums for individually purchased coverage have doubled over the past four years under Obamacare. But the authors of Obamacare don’t need to care about whether they’ve made coverage costlier, because they’re forcing you to buy it anyway.
Without a mandate, insurers would have to do what businesses have to do in every other sector of the economy: design products that you voluntarily want to buy because they represent a good value for you. Under Obamacare, they don’t have to...
~Avrik Roy, president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity.Read the whole thing.
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