What 45’s Exclusion of the Transgendered from the Military Says About Our Closeted President

Marc Zegans
Jul 27, 2017 · 3 min read

On the surface the President’s decision to exclude transgendered individuals from the military continues his pattern of authoritarian bullying–representing an entire group as a dangerous other, then threatening to ban, wall off, and now exclude all individuals belonging to this or that group from contact with an ever shrinking universe of those whom the demagogue defines as “us.” Central to this strategy is to select individuals so outside the system or so few in number and so marginalized that they have few if any effective means of fighting back — Muslims who reside outside the United States and do not have residency; Mexicans who reside here illegally, including dreamers, and now transgendered U.S. Citizens. The tactical aims here are simple: to fuel fear and anger; to feed prejudice; to rally a base with a trumped up wedge issue; to capture the news cycle, and to distract attention from the autocrat’s lengthening list of failures, corruptions, blunders and missteps, and from the consequences of a cruel, greedy, reckless and misguided policy agenda whose consequences put the nation and our world at risk.
But there is a deeper and more specific issue at play in 45s expulsion of the transgendered, one that goes beyond the now familiar stratagems employed by our errant President, an issue that exposes a profound truth about the President himself. To live a transgendered life is to claim as uncontestable the essence of whom one is, and it is to exercise the courage to express that identity fully in the face of an often hostile culture. To live a transgendered life is to express fully one’s freedom to live a life true to one’s nature, a freedom deeper still than that required to live a life according to ends of one’s own choosing, for we cannot genuinely elect the ends by which we will live until we are true to who we are. To express freedom so profound and with such courage could not be more American; to serve in the military to protect such freedom for all defines the highest form of service to Country, because it expresses patriotism that honors and cherishes our founding principles, rather than mere flag waving urgency. When we openly and fully include individuals of such virtue and constancy in our military,we rise to the promise of our founding principles.
By their insistence on living publicly as who they are, with pride, with love and without apology, transgendered individuals, contradict absolutely the premises and methods that have given rise to and steered this profoundly unAmerican presidency. It must give 45 fits that the transgendered live who they are plainly, while he, like Oz, stands behinds a curtain feeding us lies, deceiving us about his motives, insulting all who would hold him to account, much less oppose him, a man so fundamentally wed to his falsehoods that the resistance calls him by his presidential number, 45, rather than by his name.
Our fake President, who rails about the “fake news,” storms about on the public stage as perhaps the most closeted person in American. His ruthless determination to remain in the closet, causing him to use every lever at his disposal to change the subject, derail the investigation and coerce silence, while delusionally inflating his popularity, his productivity and his accomplishments, expose him for the pathetic, but dangerous fool, he is. Nothing can be more threatening to such a man, and to those who submit to his authority, than someone who is fully and completely out.
And so, as he feels the torch cutting through the wall of his safe of secrets, investigators with crowbars coming to pry open the door on his locked closet, is it any wonder that this President chooses now to deny the right of service to those who so fully express the freedom that defines the heart of our great American experiment, to live as they truly are? To me it’s no wonder at all, just a sorry truth.

Marc Zegans

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I'm a poet and a creative development advisor working with artists of all stripes and with creatively driven enterprises and arts organizations