AP reports that the Pentagon, under President Biden, will roll back Trump-era bans on trans people in military service, “issuing new rules that offer them wider access to medical care and assistance with gender transition.” Previously, Trump barred trans people from serving “in any capacity” after he took office in 2017. By 2019, and after what AP describes as a “complicated legal battle,” the Defense Department doubled down on the policy, requiring military personnel to serve only as their “birth gender.”
On its face, the repeal of anti-trans policies is technically a good thing, making official more spaces where trans people can exist without the looming specter of criminalization. But this tranny doesn’t clap for murder. Broadly, the repeal gives more people the ability to participate in violent overseas operations that have left hundreds of thousands dead, dozens of countries invaded, and whole swathes of the geopolitical landscape destabilized, all under the banner of an American imperial regime.
AP reports that of the $50 billion spent on healthcare by the military each year, only $8 million was spent on trans-related care from 2016 to 2019. Sure, it might discredit long-held right-wing talking points, which push the claim that trans care will bankrupt everyone and everything within a million-mile radius, but am I supposed to cheer? The Department of Defense spent $13.34 trillion on guns and death from 2000 to 2019, making that $8 million tossed to us look like a rusted penny on the sidewalk outside my neighborhood 7-11.
So while “allies” celebrate this win, on Trans Day of Visibility, of all days, I guess I have to re-up my plans to disappear the next time a draft rolls around. The government, and Biden by association, won’t universalize healthcare, or provide adequate guidelines to ensure trans people even receive care at all, or even intervene in Arkansas’ outright ban on trans children’s existence.
At least we get to shoot some guns and pilot murderous death robots, though.