[Federalist] The nation is worried about serious national security threats, including Chinese spy aircraft, but the U.S. Department of Defense seems pre-occupied with misplaced priorities. "Woke" policies are taking leftist ideologies to extremes with enforced compliance, even if it hurts the institution.
Since January 2021, Defense Department officials have expanded woke transgender mandates in significant ways. A comprehensive policy analysis titled "Biden Pentagon Quietly Expands Woke Transgender Policies in the Military," summarized here, compares Joe Biden and Lloyd Austin directives to the 2016 transgender policies of Barack Obama and Ashton Carter.
As in the Obama years, the Biden/Austin policy fully embraces the idea that individuals can change their "sex assigned at birth to a different gender role." Department of Defense Instruction 1300.28, updated on Dec. 20, 2022, has changed the official vocabulary of this pseudo-science, using the phrase "self-identified gender" instead of "preferred gender" throughout.
The DOD Instruction stipulates that if a person "self-identifies" as a person of the opposite sex, and if the Defense Enrollment Eligibility Reporting System (DEERS) changes a person’s bureaucratic "gender marker," a man claiming to be a woman must be treated as a woman, and vice versa.
Military commanders, doctors and nurses, chaplains, and military men and women at all levels must endorse and act on this ideological belief or suffer career penalties if they don’t. Alleged "biases against transgender individuals," which are prohibited, could include anything from "misgendering" people with the wrong pronouns to expressions of concern about medically questionable hormone treatments or surgeries for adults or military-dependent children.
Individuals who are confused about gender identity deserve compassionate counseling, competent medical care, and complete information about the serious risks and irreversible consequences of "gender-affirming" treatments that do not change biological sex. Instead, a self-diagnosis of gender dysphoria permits only one course of treatment, pushing the service member toward life-changing, often-irreversible transgender "transition," without an independent "second opinion."
Commanders are directed to consult with designated "experts," called Service Central Coordination Cells. The SCCCs have no responsibility for military operations or any obligation to put the needs of the patient first.
Biden’s regulations do not protect or even mention rights of religious liberty for chaplains and people of faith. Nor do they provide options for doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel who object to transgender ideology on moral or ethical grounds.
Once a military doctor approves, transgender transition can be deemed "complete" with or without surgical alteration of healthy body parts. At that point, as the DOD Instruction states several times: "[S]ervice members will use those berthing, bathroom, and shower facilities associated with their gender marker in DEERS."
This policy denies human biological realities and violates minimal expectations of personal privacy and modesty between men and women. Human dilemmas are discussed in PowerPoint training slide "vignettes," such as a "female to male" soldier announcing a pregnancy. |
