We have officially descended into the surreal.
The United States military isn’t what it used to be. It used to be made up of men like my Dad and my uncles, who were part of the great machine that brought down the Third Reich and Imperial Japan. It used to be made up of men like my brother-in-law, who was one of Chesty Pullers’ Frozen Chosen and who took a bullet in the leg on the retreat from Chosin Reservoir.
Apparently, now, it’s made up of precious sorts who insist on meting out punishment to anyone who might use the wrong pronoun.
A 2020 Equal Opportunity law opened the door for commanders to subject someone who refuses to affirm a transgender servicemember’s so-called gender identity to the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) for charges related to harassment, Capt. Thomas Wheatley, an assistant professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Such a move would likely infringe on a servicemember’s constitutional rights to uphold their conscience, but it might not prevent leaders from employing more subtle ways of disciplining service members.
The “more subtle ways”?
None of the military’s rules explicitly prohibit so-called “misgendering,” when someone uses pronouns to describe a transgender person which do not correspond to the person’s new gender identity, Wheatley explained. However, existing guidance implies that using pronouns rejected by another person violates Military Equal Opportunity (MEO) regulations against sex-based harassment and discrimination.
The UCMJ enforces those regulations.
Service members could conceivably be court-martialed for “refusing to use another person’s self-identified pronouns, even when their refusal stems from principled religious conviction,” Wheatley told the DCNF. “This law applies to service members at all times and in all locations, even when they’re off duty and in the privacy of their off-post residence.”
Holy crap! Really? Court-martial, for calling a dude a dude? In the military?
Look, when one joins the military, there are some things you have to accept — like your rights under the First Amendment are limited in ways that don’t apply to civilians, for example, where insubordination to a higher-ranking service member is involved. But insubordination shouldn’t apply in this case; the kind of thing described above may not only arise out of a sincere religious conviction — also protected by the First Amendment — but also out of, and let’s say this outright, reality.
Applying the UCMJ in this manner would be devastating to morale. It’s a horrible idea.
Reality doesn’t seem to enter into this issue much anymore.
See Related: O Canada! Transgender Canadian Military Officer Suspended for Sexual Harassment
Biden’s Title IX Overhaul Is a Step Back for Women’s Rights
Pentagon leaders have pushed diversity and inclusion as an indispensable component of warfighting effectiveness. Opponents say the focus focus on race, gender and sexual identity has distracted the military from more important issues and unfairly privileged minorities. DEI priorities have now overtaken matters of conscience in multiple domains.
An indispensable component of warfighting effectiveness? What a load of poppycock, drivel, and goo. Let’s peel a couple of layers off this, shall we?
There is no place in the known universe where “diversity and inclusion” are increasing warfighting effectiveness. A military organization, to be effective at its core mission — namely, to close with and destroy the enemy by fire, maneuver, and shock effect — has to be the opposite of diverse and inclusive. It has to be one big machine, with all its component parts uniform — one might say, “well-regulated” — and all functioning properly, together, as a unit. The big Green Machine works that way, and you can’t just have people go haring off on their own, claiming that it’s “diverse.” At best, you destroy unit cohesion. At worst, you get a lot of people killed.
Also, many of these people, including especially “transgender” people who are dependent on medical intervention (read that: hormone injections) to maintain their status, are not deployable. Our military forces are not a cornucopia of posting possibilities, nor are they a jobs program; they are an organization whose purpose is to kill people and break things, to stand between the citizens and anyone who would do them harm or take their stuff. Anything that aids in that mission is good. Anything that detracts from it is bad.
Our military is badly broken at the highest levels. It’s time for a housecleaning. We have too many overfed peacetime officers. We have too many generals who have bought into this crap. It’s time to set some people back on the block, and I don’t just mean the generals. Anyone currently in the military today who is so thin-skinned, honestly, as to object over being “misgendered” needs to have their pronouns changed to “discharged” and “civilian.”
Then, maybe, our armed services can get back to the job of training to find bad guys and revoke their birth certificates.