The U.S. Supreme Court, which is supposed to protect our liberties, is failing in its duty in allowing the Trump administration to ban from the U.S. Armed Forces transgender individuals who volunteered for military service. How unjust and unfair and unAmerican.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth celebrated the ruling with a post on X, but he’s the first person in the Pentagon that we should be getting rid of and the serving transgender troops should be left alone.
A big plank of the administration’s argument here has been that the presence of transgender troops is a detriment to morale and unit cohesion. They’ve never actually provided any evidence to indicate that this is a problem for the actual units on which these real people serve, but there is one certain morale and cohesion problem here: removing service members without cause just because of their identity.
It is not a particularly good message for a military already lagging behind on recruitment goals that service members can be removed on a whim, despite otherwise meeting all applicable qualifications, just because of a personal identity marker that has no bearing on their ability to perform their job well, whether they’re infantry or an engineer or an analyst or a cook. Once upon a time, it was Black troops that would negatively impact combat readiness and military morale. Or gay troops. There’s always some group that the brass can look down upon.
If the White House is seeking to rid the military of unqualified personnel, they can start Hegseth, who has dedicated his early tenure in a role that he was never qualified for to alienating troops, putting classified national security information in unsecured forums, and generally playing a defense secretary on TV much more so than actually engaging in the work of keeping the U.S. military in good shape. His mismanagement has already caused staff exodus and dysfunction in the top ranks.
It’s worth noting that this is not a hypothetical issue in the sense that the administration was not considering whether or not to allow transgender individuals to serve in the armed forces. Thousands — 4,000 by the DoD’s count, though other estimates put it multiples higher — already do and have been doing so for years without incident. Their numbers are minuscule in comparison to the over 2 million active service members that make up the nation’s military, begging the question of why Trump and Hegseth have found it a good use of time and resources to go all the way to the Supreme Court just to discharge them for no reason.
The answer to that, of course, is that they’ve got nothing else. These are not competent people and they don’t know how to do anything except culture war and tossing red meat to the base. In the face of nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan edging closer to all-out war, Russia ramping up its invasion of Ukraine, our European allies charting a path forward without a long-standing reliance on American military power and countless other challenges, our military leaders are focusing on pushing out qualified service members as our planes fall into the sea. Our adversaries will surely be rejoicing.
