The Good Within the Tweet-in-Chief’s Transgender Military Ban-scrimination

Salina Brett
Jul 27, 2017 · 3 min read

Funny thing about closet problems — no one pays much attention until the door swings open and “O!M!G!” look what comes spilling out!

I served in the Navy for 9 years (much longer ago than I care to recall). I said NO-thing about my gender identity — and truly, that was at a point in my life when I thought it simply a “cross-dressing issue” that I could control. On the national stage, President Clinton enacted the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. While not the perfect Presidential act — it brought light to the fact that LGB people really do serve actively and proudly within our armed forces. Eventually, the laws changed toward equality for that part of the LGBTQ military community.

As our society continues to make in-roads toward gender and sexual equality, a wide diversity of people holding transgender umbrellas have been shuffling along near the end of the parade. You know, when most of the crowd is gone, the floats and bands are already tearing down and putting away their instruments, but there are those few who stand around, waiting for traffic to clear or for their relatives in the City Hall Citizens Group or the Neighborhood Watch Women’s League to stroll past and wave and hand out pamphlets.

Imagine the Grand Marshall of the parade taking a stroll back, spotting the tiny group of people shaped and looking a bit odd for the clothes they wear, holding rainbow colored umbrellas and wearing t-shirts with some bizarre symbol on it. He glares and stomps through the rag-tag end-of-the-parade groups, plants his feet, thrusts a small, indignant finger at them, and shouts,

“GET OUT OF HERE! YOU’RE NOTHING BUT A BLIGHT UPON THIS ENTIRE PARADE!”

Everyone gasps.

Most are appalled.

Everyone SEES!

The closet door has just been opened and all those shoved-in contents are being kicked around the room.

Look at this old shoe: Does it really matter what kind of body shoots a gun, flies a helicopter, or operates a nuclear reactor?

And good lord, why am I keeping these old check registers when I have everything online?

The cost of transgender medical care to the military: $2.4 — $8.4 million dollars. Military budget for healthcare: $6.27 billion dollars. POTUS vacation cost Jan — April 2017: $29 million dollars.

Oh look! I found a calculator in this out-of-the-closet mess:

$8.4m / $6.27b x 100 = 0.134% of the health budget

$29m/$8.4m = 3.4 times more money spent in 10 weeks for POTUS vacations than a whole year of transgender health care.

I wonder what ELSE might be in this closet??

So — while I absolutely do NOT agree with the recent tweets from our Toddler-in-Chief, he has done what many children do — bring light to a problem that the adults might have overlooked had it not been for the temper tantrum.

Hmm … or was it just a distraction? Does the Russian nesting doll look right to you?

Salina Brett

Written by

I am transgender, trans-spiritual, and transformative. My life purpose is to radiate Divine Light through the LGBTQ+ community and into the world.

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