Military Transgender Catch-22

Jere Krischel
Jul 27, 2017 · 4 min read

While I’m happy to hear other perspectives, it seems to me there are only two options for the consideration of transgender in the military — either transgender is a serious medical condition, that requires special treatment and care, or transgender is a superficial choice, in which case it doesn’t require any special treatment.

Option 1: It’s perfectly normal and healthy

Imagine you’re born male. You like dressing up like a girl. You think it might be neat to have breasts, and female genitalia. Maybe you feel like you would be more comfortable that way. But despite these preferences, being treated like the man you are isn’t a big deal to you. You don’t feel like killing yourself when you don’t pass as a woman, and don’t feel any particular stress when looking at your natural body in the mirror. For you, being transgender is a completely internal thing, and while you feel a certain way, you don’t need external validation to keep you from killing yourself.

In this case, being transgender and having surgery and hormones to alter your body is really just a choice, not something required to prevent your suicide. Like getting a tattoo, or taking steroids for weightlifting, it isn’t a mental illness, it’s just a preference. You feel better having that dragon tattoo on your face, but if someone doesn’t like your tattoo, or doesn’t acknowledge your tattoo, it doesn’t bother you. If you needed to get a job that didn’t allow tattoos, you’ve got no problem covering it up during work hours.

If you believe transgender isn’t a serious medical mental condition, then there’s no reason to force people to treat transgender people any differently after their surgery than before their surgery — if you get a fancy tattoo, and people don’t notice it, or treat you any different than before, it’s perfectly acceptable. If you get a body modification to make your ears pointy, it’s perfectly acceptable if nobody treats you like an elf. Yes, you look like an elf, and you may even pass as an elf, but for someone to recognize that you’re still just a human, even if you look very much like an elf, should not be cause for alarm, shame, or discomfort.

Every Halloween, we dress up as things that we’re not, and enjoy pretending to be all sorts of things, but everyone knows that it’s just pretend, and the appearance change doesn’t actually change our natures. If transgender is a perfectly natural and healthy condition that isn’t in response to severe mental distress when a disconnect between someone’s feelings and someone physical body is illustrated, then it’s no big deal to recognize that it’s only pretend.

Option 2: It’s a serious issue deserving sympathy and support

On the other hand, if every time you look in the mirror and don’t see a dragon tattoo on your face, or every time you walk out in public and people don’t acknowledge your dragon tattoo, you feel like killing yourself, it’s something else. Anytime you feel like killing yourself is a sign of serious mental distress, and it’s especially worrying if the perfectly rational and normal behavior of other people can trigger that kind of distress. The words “excuse me, sir”, should not drive you into existential mental distress in any situation, and if you are so fragile as to be viscerally offended and hurt by that, you’ve got a real problem.

In this case, transgender people should be granted the support and help they need to refrain from killing themselves. While I’m skeptical that surgical and hormonal treatments are effective, especially if we cannot control whether or not transgender people “pass”, if we’re dealing with people who are at high risk of killing themselves, maybe that’s one of the options that has to be explored. There’s definitely more study that needs to be done, but what I’ve seen so far in the statistics has been pretty harrowing, with post-op suicide rates greater or equal to pre-op suicide rates.

In this context, it’s completely clear — it is inappropriate to enlist people with such serious mental medical issues into the military. Now, just like people with allergies who lie about it when joining the military, there will be pre-op transgenders who will lie about their feelings when joining the military — but the DOD policy of excluding transgender people based on the significant seriousness of transgender mental health issues is just as rational as excluding people with allergies who might die when exposed to CS gas during boot camp. I’m sure many people with allergies have served with distinction in the military, just as I’m sure there are at least a few pre-op transgenders who have served with distinction in the military, but the policies have a rational basis, and we cannot eliminate those policies in order to show homage to the exceptional cases that may exist.

Other options?

Like I said at the beginning, I’m open to other perspectives, but I think this is a pretty clear demarcation — either we see transgender people as fragile, unable to cope with their natural bodies and other people’s reactions to them, or we see transgender people as robust and therefore not needing special treatment. In either case, their transgender journey should occur outside of the military.

Jere Krischel
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