Trying to stop a gender revolution: The real reason for Trump’s ban on trans military service
Today, President Trump announced that trans people will not be able to serve openly in the U.S. military “in any capacity,” derailing the progress made by trans veterans and service members in recent years. In the Tweets where the announcement was made—because yes, we currently live in a world where major policy decisions are announced on Twitter first—Trump explained his reasoning: “Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender [sic] in the military would entail.”
Trans people, of course, have a lot to say about this — especially those who have served in the military. It’s worth saying from the outset that I’m not a veteran and have no personal or familial relationship to the military. But I do know some things about categories, naming, and bodies, and as a result I know two things about this situation: 1) transness is being conceptualized as a medical condition in need of medical intervention for reasons of political expediency, and 2) the military is going to have a hell of a time enforcing a transgender ban, or even defining who it applies to.
Trump’s emphasis on medical costs relies on a pathologized model of trans identity. In other words, being trans is conceptualized as a disorder that requires expensive treatment, rather than an identity category that can be expressed by anyone, irrespective of body parts. Even if we put aside the veracity of the dubious claim that trans care creates “tremendous costs” for the military, which is undermined by studies like the one carried out by the Rand Corporation, this is an exclusion of an entire class based on criteria that only applies to a portion of that class. This is on par with, say, banning cisgender women from military service because of the “tremendous medical costs” associated with pregnancy, rather than having regulations about how pregnancy itself might affect someone’s military status.
If medical costs were the real issue, the focus of the policy would be whether the military covers trans-related health care, rather than excluding all trans people from the armed services. Clearly it is the disruption factor about which Trump and his allies are really concerned. Trump talks about problems “that transgender [sic] in the military would entail” — would entail, as if trans people were not already present in the military. Trans people have been in the military for as long as trans people and militaries have existed. The presence of closeted trans women in the U.S. military during WWII, for example, doesn’t seem to have been disruptive in any way. The disruption comes from trans military personnel’s demands to have their identities acknowledged by the country and institutions they serve.
The new policy stance confirms that no, the US government will not acknowledge or validate trans identities. But the way Trump has articulated the policy represents a marked shift from the logic behind the previous ban on trans people entering the military, which was grounded in the assumption that being trans is a mental health disorder. This change in rhetoric is presumably rooted in changing ideas about trans people as part of our species’ natural gender diversity rather than mentally ill individuals whose identities are produced by disordered thinking. But it also brings up additional problems about the criteria that will determine who is excluded.
When trans identity is pathologized, transgender people can be taken to refer to people who make use of medical technologies to change gendered aspects of the body. When the emphasis is on “tremendous medical costs,” this further implies that trans people are individuals seeking genital surgery (it’s hard to imagine the cost of hormones being described as “tremendous” the way surgery often is). Of course, this is a common perspective, since the American public has long thought of trans people as individuals undergoing a “sex change” epitomized by genital surgery rather than the more common forms of trans bodily change, like hormone replacement therapy.
Of course, the problem with this thinking is that many trans people never have genital surgery and do not desire it. Many trans people do not want any kind of medical transition. Many trans people achieve bodies they feel comfortable in through non-medicalized means. And even those of us who do pursue medical interventions do not necessarily have any ongoing medical costs once our desired bodily changes are in place. One of the most common misunderstandings cis people hold about trans experience is that being trans is about primarily about changing one’s body. And for plenty of trans people, bodily changes are hugely important. But the way trans people define transness is more likely to be about how someone identifies internally rather than how they express that identity externally. If changes to the body are not universally desired, let alone pursued, how will the military determine who is trans? How will they define transgender for the purpose of enforcing this policy? What forms of gender transgressions will be allowed to remain, and what kinds will be excised?
Desire for surgery doesn’t unite trans people, but what does is a desire recognition, validation, and inclusion. It is remarkable that the argument Trump has made so far (we’re always on standby for unpredictable changes), while wrongheaded and transphobic, may be evidence of positive changes in trans people’s place in contemporary US society. He did not take the tact of arguing that trans people should be excluded because we’re sick, or because we pose some sort of danger (despite the use of this approach in other transphobic government actions, such as the bathroom bills in North Carolina or Texas). He did not even imply we are excluded because trans women aren’t really women and trans men aren’t really men. Regardless of the actual reasoning of this ban, it is presented as pragmatic rather than principled. And in a backwards sort of way, the reasoning Trump offered is half right: trans inclusion does disrupt the status quo.
In other words, trans people are being excluded because acknowledging and including women as women and men as men challenges the way our culture naturalizes gender as an innate, biological phenomenon. We’re being excluded because we upend assumptions about what it means for bodies to be female or male and how those bodies relate to who we are as people. We’re being excluded because we are disruptive.
Fuck yes we are.
