According to CNN, the Biden administration is moving to make gender change surgery available through Veterans Affairs hospitals starting as early as this summer.
The previous policy made other gender transition services available through the VA, including hormone treatments and counseling. The surgery would be available to active duty and reserve personnel as well as those eligible through their VA benefits.
In 2018, the Defense Department counted 14,700 transgender military personnel currently serving or in the reserves. It’s unknown how many soldiers would opt for what’s known as “gender transition” surgery.
Veterans Affairs Secretary Denis McDonough will announce the change in policy at a Pride event tonight.
“We are taking the first necessary steps to expand VA’s care to include gender confirmation surgery — thus allowing transgender vets to go through the full gender confirmation process with VA by their side,” McDonough’s prepared remarks state.
One estimate — done by the National Center for Transgender Equality — estimates that there 134,000 transgender veterans.
Gender confirmation surgery has “been proven effective at mitigating serious health conditions, including suicidality, substance abuse, and dysphoria,” a VA spokesperson said. LGBTQ+ veterans experience “mental illness and suicidal thoughts at far higher rates than those outside their community,” McDonough’s prepared remarks state.
The move follows an effort in the Biden-Harris administration to make diversity and inclusion, including the rights of LGBTQ+ individuals, a priority. President Joe Biden, alongside Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, repealed a Trump-era ban on most transgender individuals serving in the military shortly after Biden took office.
The only question that should be relevant is can they fight? All the woke nonsense in the world won’t help them — or the men and women they serve with — if they can’t or don’t fight. For that, the jury is still out.
Two-thirds of active duty personnel support allowing transgenders in the military. But do they trust them?
Opponents of transgender service members have argued that their medical and psychological needs degrade readiness and unit cohesion ― particularly if they are diagnosed with gender dysphoria, a type of anxiety associated with feeling one’s mind doesn’t match one’s body.
A similar argument propped up the “don’t ask, don’t tell” ban on homosexual troops until 2011, though research post-integration has shown no measurable differences.
The study conducted by the Pentagon showed support across the board for allowing transgenders to serve.
Participants ranged in age from 18 to 54 and were made up of 41 percent soldiers, 35 percent airmen, 14 percent sailors and 9 percent Marines. Of those, 57 percent of respondents were white, 60 percent were heterosexual and 66 percent were male.
Beyond that, 75 percent of women and 81 percent of gay, lesbian and bisexual respondents showed support, while heterosexuals polled at 56 percent and men at 62 percent, with black, Latino and white respondents at 69 percent, 75 percent and 64 percent, respectively.
Should the taxpayers have to pick up the tab for anyone — soldier, veteran, or not — so that someone can mutilate their bodies in search of a “cure” for their gender dysphoria? The Biden administration says yes.
But will they fund surgery to reverse the process if necessary?
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