Given that 50 years have passed since homosexuality was partially decriminalised in England and Wales, it was perhaps fitting that President Donald Trump should bring in a ban on transgender people serving in the US military.”The United States government will not accept or allow transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the US military,” tweeted Trump. “Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail.” So, that’s it, then. Bigotry is alive and well in the USA, another policy announcement by the most powerful man on earth, via twitter.
No one in the US government has yet worked out how to implement Trump’s new plan, especially the defence secretary James Mattis who was only told about it after Trump had been on twitter. It has the classic Trump hallmark of policy being made on the hoof. The question is this: does it stand up to scrutiny?
Well, the US military spends several times as much on transgender people as it does on Viagra, some $42 million a year, so perhaps it doesn’t stand up at all. Quite why frontline troops require Viagra – I appreciate that there could be a serious and genuine reason – I don’t know but in the grand scheme of things, we are talking about buttons in financial terms. Of more concern is what will happen to existing transgender personnel. Will they be discharged, or unable to re-enlist? Naturally, the Donald hadn’t thought of that one before starting to tweet, but for many it will be a very serious matter.
There are any number of jokes you could make about Trump’s decision but when it comes down to it, this is not a funny story at all. Our five living prime ministers have today made statements praising the huge improvement in LGBT rights, some like Theresa May acknowledging past mistakes – fair play to her, I say – and yet just across the pond, the idiot who leads the western world, himself previously sympathetic to LGBT rights, at least when he was angling for votes takes us back to the 1960s, when gay people were perverts and criminals. In Trump’s world, they still are. Or is it less simple than that?
How about if Trump has actually used this previously benign issue to muddy the waters, to change the subject away from his faltering presidency? It may not come across that way in the media, but Trump is in a lot of trouble right now and it is not beyond the realms of possibility his world may come crashing in on him sometime soon. What better thing to do than latch onto an issue that unites the alt right world in the US? I wouldn’t put it past him, this nasty, cynical weasel of a human being.
As former Defence Secretary Ash Carter put it: “To choose service members on other grounds than military qualifications is social policy and has no place in our military.” Exactly so and anything else is bigotry or political cynicism. In Trump’s case you have to suspect it is both.
