on new restrictions ......
President Trump issued an order late Friday that supports a ban on many transgender troops, deferring to a new Pentagon plan that essentially cancels a policy adopted by the Obama administration.
The decision revokes a full ban that Trump issued last summer but disqualifies U.S. troops who have had gender reassignment surgery, as recommended by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.
“By its very nature, military service requires sacrifice,” Mattis wrote in a memo to the president that was released Friday. “The men and women who serve voluntarily accept limitations on their personal liberties — freedom of speech, political activity, freedom of movement — in order to provide the military lethality and readiness necessary to ensure American citizens enjoy their personal freedoms to the fullest extent.”
Current transgender service members who have not undergone reassignment surgery should be allowed to stay, as long as they have been medically stable for 36 consecutive months in their biological sex before joining the military and are able to deploy across the world, Mattis recommended.
Mattis recommended that anyone diagnosed with gender dysphoria, the condition of wanting to transition gender, since the Obama administration ended the Pentagon’s longtime ban on transgender service in 2016 may continue to serve. The decision amounts to a “grandfathering” of those affected by the new policy.
In his memo to the president, Mattis specifically challenged the thinking of the Obama administration when it repealed the ban in 2016. Mattis said that he found a Rand Corp. study — commissioned by the Pentagon under Obama that became a backbone of the repeal process — to be flawed.
“It referred to limited and heavily caveated data to support its conclusions, glossed over the impacts of health care costs, readiness and unit cohesion, and erroneously relied on the selective experiences of foreign militaries with different operational requirements than our own,” Mattis wrote. “In short, this policy issue has proven more complex than the prior administration or RAND assumed.”
Federal judges required the military to allow transgender recruits beginning Jan. 1, and the Pentagon signaled in December that it would not stand in the way of the courts’ rulings. Instead, it issued new policy guidance to recruits to explain how to enlist transgender men and women, and stated in a policy paper that the guidance “shall remain in effect until expressly revoked.” .....snip~
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/tru...t5R&ocid=ientp
I don't mind transgendered serving as long as they are mentally stable. But I don't think the Military should pay for their transitioning. Its bad enough that they will require mental health services just over their delusion. But the Armed Forces shouldn't be giving them the surgeries they want. What say ye?
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