The bogeyman that progressives feared Donald Trump would unleash upon the United States appears to have already arrived – and inauguration day is still more than 50 days away. The president-elect is reportedly planning an executive order that would kick out all transgender members of the US military. The order, which could come on 20 January, Trump’s first day back in the White House, looks set to result in the removal from the military of about 15,000 active service personnel who are transgender.
Having campaigned on a strident ‘anti-woke’ agenda, Trump’s focus on identity politics comes as little surprise. But what is surprising is the swiftness and extent of the incoming president’s attack on transgender rights – along with the potential such focus could have on expanding the conflict around gender identity.
There is little doubt that the Biden-Harris administration possessed a curious – if not at times creepy – obsession with trans issues. Who can forget Biden’s cringy interview with trans-influencer Dylan Mulvaney in 2022, whose misguided partnership with Anheuser-Busch a year later potentially cost the beer giant dearly. Or the transgender reveller who flashed her breasts at the White House Pride party that same summer.
Harris, meanwhile, held some of the most radical pro-trans positions of any democracy – advocating that gender confirmation surgeries be covered by the government for migrants and prisoners during her first run for the White House in 2020. Harris’s presidential campaign subsequently attempted to scrub this record once she ousted Biden, but Trump cannily made this paper trail his own.
‘We will get … transgender insanity the hell out of our schools, and we will keep men out of women’s sports,’ Trump declared during his 11th hour campaign rally in Madison Square Garden in late October. ‘Is there a dynamic that’s going on where if you become trans, that’s the way to reject your white privilege’, asked JD Vance on the Joe Rogan show a few days later.
It makes sense that biological men should not be allowed to compete against biological women – or that the recent surge in trans-identifying young people may be due to some sort of social contagion rather than actual scientific fact. As the violent imagery resulting from matches featuring Algerian wrestler Imane Khelif from this past summer’s Olympics confirm, the physical advantages of gender-asymmetric competition are both unfair and immoral.
But Trump’s proposed military ban does little to tackle such issues, nor the far more pressing conflict over medical interventions for trans-identifying young people. Trump would do far better to focus on the futures of gender-struggling young people than adults who are serving their nation. This doesn’t mean outright banning medical interventions for such young people, but the US following its European counterparts to both limit their use and mandate far more detailed research on their benefits. This is not just good policy, but common sense – the type of common sense missing from the coercive, punitive, progressive-led debate on gender identity and the type of common sense Trump claimed to embrace during his campaign.
There is nothing sensical about kicking qualified soldiers out of the military, particularly at a moment when incoming soldier numbers have never been more dire. Military recruitment targets fell short by over 40,000 last year, said Rachel Branaman, executive director of Modern Military Association of America, which campaigns on behalf of LGBTQ+ military personnel and veterans. Booting out 15,000 transgender soldiers is just the wrong move at the wrong time.
From the Biden White House to Bud Light, the trans debate has assumed an outsized role in the culture wars in ways that have been bad for everyone. Children have been recklessly medicalised with little care for necessity or consequence. Parents have been excluded from making informed decisions about kids. Support for other LGBT issues – such as equal rights and marriage equality – has ebbed for the first time in decades. And critical thinking and scientific research around the sheer efficacy of gender-based treatments has been shut out and stifled. Most crucially, the needs of actual transgender people – of which there are many, though likely far less than advocates demand we believe – have been lost in all the talk about hormones and top surgeries.
Trans-overreach may even have cost Kamala Harris the election. But that doesn’t justify Trump’s military crackdown. The real battle the president -lect should be fighting is against campaigners who want to turn a blind eye to science in the gender debate. The once and future president should leave America’s real trans-warriors alone.
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