# Military Gender/Sexuality Standards



## MAquino (Jul 26, 2017)

This morning President Trump tweeted his decision to ban "transgenders" (TG) in the military. This will obviously evoke a firestorm from TG advocates. [Politically, to be sure, Trump is "crazy like a fox": The Democrats concluded that one of the reasons Hillary punted the election was her conspicuous advocacy of TG, i.e. the "bathrooms" issue. If Trump takes an anti-TG position now, the Democratic Tump-haters are forced to aggressively champion TG, which if voter opinion repeats itself will damage them at the 2018 ballot box.]

All is not lost for the Dems, however: The Prez has also denied servicemen Viagra. All the next Democratic nominee has to do for electoral landslide is promise to restore it. [Is this a great country or what?]

But beyond this political theater there is the more general question of sexuality in the American military. From WW2 to the present there have been several policy changes, often with considerable emotion. The changes have been inexorably in the direction of more toleration and inclusion on any sexual criteria from basic gender to personal expression. SOF is the most arduous and dangerous component of the military; hence it is here that these developments are the most impactful and controversial.

I haven't come across an existing thread that addresses the entire topic. [There's one about females in SOF, but that seems to focus on one woman' Ranger School graduation, which is just one manifestation of the overall question.]

So the concept of this thread is to examine the entire topic: how it got to this point and whether all or part of it should be changed [back, forward, or ?].

I'm a post-WW2 Baby Boomer. I grew up in the Walt Disney "Eisenhower 50s", then saw all the traditional values attacked in the counterculture 60s. It began as anti- Jim Crow racial racial activism, and the passion for anti-dicrimination spilled over into "women's lib" as well. It was no longer acceptable for women to aspire "just" to be wives and mothers _a la_ Harriet Nelson. This was demeaning, servile, even shameful. Now women had to have breadwinning careers, and that meant competing with men. Any "males only" restriction was a threat, an insult to be overcome.

Exascerbating this was the steady erosion of real incomes. In the 1950s a man could make enough to support wife & children. In 2017 both spouses must work, and even then it's precarious.

All of this placed tremendous stress on traditional male & female roles. Men's feelings of inadequacy to be "Ozzie Nelsons" resulted in unstable marriages, non-marriage relationships, and homosexuality. Women simultaneously became more independent & self-reliant, and access to birth control & abortion freed them from being reproductively enslaved to their bodies. Male abandonment of masculinity and female assertion of it resulted eventually in today's affectation of "TG". Only a few years ago such an assertion would have been preposterous; now we find one President (Obama) endorsing it, and the next one (Trump) rejecting it. Once again the American military finds itself the "social laboratory", because it's locked to the Constitution more directly and tightly than national society generally.

So where do we go from here? This opening-post is already overlong, so I'll pause here ...


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## Ooh-Rah (Jul 26, 2017)

MAquino said:


> I haven't come across an existing thread that addresses the entire topic.



Plenty of discussion in these threads....

The Trump Presidency

The self identity thread.

The Slope is Slippery


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## TLDR20 (Jul 26, 2017)

The females in ranger school thread is like 100 pages long. @MAquino did you search or read any of the current threads we had before starting this one? We have gone down this path many times and there are a ton of well thought out intelligent posts in all sides of the issues. 

Maybe you should read around a bit more before starting new threads.

Just a friendly heads up.


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## MAquino (Jul 27, 2017)

Ooh-Rah said:


> Plenty of discussion in these threads....



Thanks, just viewed them. They appear to focus on questions of tolerance or bias regarding sexual preferences. Everyone likes to be open-minded, tolerant, "live and let live". But what I'm suggesting in the into post is that socioeconomic stresses in contemporary America have gotten to the point of disrupting natural sexual instincts, resulting in psychotic, self-rejecting aberrations such as homosexuality and its more extreme expression of bodily misuse and mutilation (which is absurd to call "sex change"; you can destroy your genitals and shock your body with alien hormones, but your natural gender remains all the way down to your genetic structure). I think any M.D. psychiatrist or surgeon who endorses and profits from this should be delicensed, if not indeed prosecuted for malpractice. Sorry to outrage the Political Correctness Police, but I really think the realities of natural body constitution and functioning speak for themselves; this has nothing to do with religion or other moral dictates.


Homosexuals and TGs want it officially proclaimed, and socially accepted, that there is absolutely nothing wrong with them from the standpoint of health, maturity, and/or mentality. So much so that even to question this is now taboo. Violate it and you're inviting severe reaction to the point of violence. In fairness, such individuals have also suffered violence themselves from "normal" people who consider them "threatening". But this is a societal environment substantially beyond the military community, and of course SOF.

What I think is of legitimate concern here is that the military does not exist to be a convenient "laboratory" for testing social experiments. It has a completely different reason for being, which is national defense to the extent of killing. Humans are not naturally disposed to kill one another; when they do, it's usually the consequence of extreme emotions and/or mental illness. But that is exactly what the military, and again especially SOF, *cannot* allow. Our soldiers are authorized to kill only when in complete control of their emotions and actions. Very much as in _Casino Royale_:



> M: [as Solange's dead body is carried away] I would ask you if you could remain emotionally detached, but that's not your problem, is it, Bond?
> 
> James Bond: No.



The sexual drive is a very powerful, primal one. If it's, shall we say, "out of balance" in an individual, I don't think that person should be placed in 007's position, or that of his counterparts wearing funny green or tan hats.

The situation with regard to women in combat assignments, and again especially so in SF/Ranger/SEAL units, is much simpler. If a female team member is in danger of injury, rape, or death, there isn't one man in this entire Forum who wouldn't instantly protect her, including at the "expense of the mission". It's in our souls. I am reminded of one sequence in _The Siege of Firebase Gloria_, where USMC Cpl diNardo is harshly interrogating a VC in the firebase aid station, to the horror of USN Dr. Flanagan:



> Flanagan: What kind of animal are you?
> 
> diNardo: Animal? Lady, do you have any idea what Charlie would do if he came in here? He would rape you and your nurses until you're all dead! But you know what? They'd have to kill me first. Animal? I'm no animal.



I'd say that sums it up. And that's why, please: *No* females in SF, SEALs, Rangers, or any other close-combat assignment. No insult intended to their courage, ambition, patriotism, etc. There are plenty of other military career paths in which I'm delighted to see them promoted all the way up to stars.


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## pardus (Jul 27, 2017)

Redundant thread. Closed.


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