The Fear of the Power of Transgender
How Trump’s ban of transgendered individuals in the US armed forces further perpetuates stereotypes of men and women.
Last Wednesday, Trump tweeted that transgender individuals will no longer be able to serve “in any capacity” in the US armed forces, creating a huge uproar across the united states. CNN released an article that goes into more detail about how Trump does not yet have a plan to implement his decision.
Trump’s action towards the transgender community draws attention to the longstanding relation of masculine and feminine qualities to stereotypical roles in society. Let’s take a look at the preexisting views of men and women in the armed forces. The US armed forces has always been viewed as a place almost completely dominated by male figures, except for the few strong willed and masculine women who dared to enter the field. Fighting has always been contextualized in association with males. For females a fight would be considered a cat fight, giving the connotation a lesser meaning.
Wars have always been thought to have been fought by men, and the women were expected to stay home and take care of the house and the children while the men were away. These longstanding views invokes the thought of Anthropologist Emily Martin’s article The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles Martin writes about how the role of science has stereotyped the male and female reproductive processes according to each body in research textbooks.
One popular account has it that the sperm carry out a “perilous journey” into the “warm darkness,” where some fall away “exhausted.” “Survivors” “assault” the egg, the successful candidates “surrounding the prize.” —Martin (490)
The egg is a sleeping, vulnerable princess that is woken up my the knight in sperm-ing armor. The sperm have been stereotypically depicted as strong, overpowering, and determined. On the other hand, eggs have been depicted to the weak, shy, and incapable-to-do-anything-by-herself. These concepts are brought into textbooks that are used to teach children as young as eleven years old, engraining the roles of male and female down to the smallest anatomies of their bodies. In essence science has inferred that the parts of the human body are only good for one particular function and are not made to do anything else. I like to think of Trump as thinking with the same logic. Males do what males do, and females do what females do. Any overlapping or crossing of the sexes and their responsibilities is unacceptable in all it’s forms.
Trump is a homophobic misogynist, though he will never publicly admit it. He believes that women would not interfere or become involved in men’s work. To him, the idea of transgender is unfathomable and blurs the lines between stereotypes. Today’s society has reached a turning point where women have become strong heads in the workforce and the LGBT community has gained some sense of respect in their relationships. With all the recent positive changes for rights of these communities, Trump and his administration claim to ban transgender people from participating in the armed forces, he stereotypes them into not being able to make serious, overwhelming choices when in reality they made the serious, overwhelming choice to another gender. He also stated that transgender people would burden the US Government because they would be costly with medical services and would cause major disruption to the armed forces. In my eyes, Trump is afraid of their capabilities, fearing that they will be strong enough to take over the the male dominated duties. He is trying to avoid “contamination” in these fields, but in reality the use of transgender individuals would be extremely beneficial because in most cases they have both the qualities of a male and female and essentially create gender equality in the field.
If Trump was smart, he would think about using feminine qualities for erotic value and sexual power. Trump could use women (both natural born and transgendered) to encourage superiority. Audre Lorde, a writer and civil rights activist, claims that the male models of power value the “unexpressed and unrecognized feelings … every oppression in our history must corrupt or distort those various sources of power in the culture of the oppressed…that can provide energy for change. Now for women, this is meant the suppression of the erotic as a considered source of our power and information within our lives.” (1:14–1:46). Women have been constantly looked over in their use of erotic power. Male dominated societies have abused and devalued this source of power and deemed women as inferior in many ways, not allowing them to grow and succeed. Trump’s ban is not targeting specifically women, however the fact that transgendered individuals have a mix of both male and female, he fears that this breed crossing might create a new source of power…something that beyond erotic.
Honestly, I believe that he made this random political maneuver as an attempt to create a diversion from his son’s controversial meeting with a Russian lawyer and from all of the other scandals that trump has been involved in.
