Aylee
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quote:
ORIGINAL: LadyPact
quote:
ORIGINAL: Aylee
Could she have done all of this while taking hormones that would make her physically weaker? Also, how would needing to take medication daily have affected her service? Deployed 13 times? Seal teams? Pharmacies were not just around the corner.
You're assuming that a person would be 'weaker' taking hormones or not able to live up to the standard of service. We could argue about the latter until we're blue in the face because I know transgender persons that would be more than qualified physically to pass the required PT (physical training) standards for service.
I have a bit of a hang up with the pharmacy comment as well. If a person isn't associated with the military in any way, they probably don't know how this gets handled. When it comes to military service members being sent from one place to the other, whether that be PCS, (sorry, permanent change of station) deployments, schools, field exercise, whatever, they get this neat list of stuff they have to do in anticipation of where they will arrive. One of the things on that list is a requirement for the service member to have a certain number of day's supply for any maintenance meds that are currently prescribed. How many day's worth depends on where the person is going and how long it is expected before that person will have regular access to a pharmacy or to set up meds to be mailed to their unit if they aren't at an established base. It would be the same as it would for any service member that is on high blood pressure meds, pills for high cholesterol, antidepressants, or anything else.
General comment.
Some of the posts on this thread kind of make me wonder if people really understand how this thing would work. It's not like trans* persons would be able to go to the recruiter, take the ASVAB, and once they hit in-processing for basic, the military is just going to start handing out meds like candy. There was nothing in the Obama plan that said anything about people getting a short cut to transitioning from the medical aspect that would be any different from the civilian world.
What would be different:
1) Any active duty military member would be addressed and treated as the gender they are transitioning TO. That included health care, facilities, accommodations, etc. This would be regardless of where they were in transition, including anatomy.
2) Training of service members, including health professionals and those involved in CoC, would be in motion as of July 1, 2017. It would be required quarterly, at minimum. (This is a part of what Kristen Beck said in the interview about leadership and cohesion.)
Cost.
This is just my impression. I think there are some folks who really don't understand how military medical benefits work. There's this amazing leap being made that anybody who ever serves has medical coverage for life, including prescriptions, and it just doesn't work that way. How it does work goes something like this:
1) You've done the full boat, meaning you have been a full time service member (or spouse) until retirement. To obtain retiree status, anybody joining today has to do the full thirty years. Some retirees are under what is known as the grandfather clause, which means when they joined, the requirement was twenty years.
2) You have a military caused condition that puts you at medical disability that is CAUSED by your service. This can mean a malady proven by time in service, from order of Command, etc. Skip the obvious. Think about something like what a big deal it was that Agent Orange was proven to cause cancer. It had to be linked to a person's time in service, and responsibility, for the military to give people coverage.
Mental Health Issues.
A decent portion of the military's spending on 'health' has been about mental health issues, especially PTSD, anti-anxiety, depression, and a variety of other causes. A report published just last year by the RAND Center for Military Health Policy Research says that a full 20% of people returning from duty in Iraq, Afghanastan, and similar deployments, require mental health treatment. What transgender persons would add to this is a drop in the bucket compared to the one in FIVE that need mental health care. The Army has spent more on the legal defense of people killing their intimate partners than they could ever the projected costs from trans* individuals.
I did not realize that they were enlisting/commissioning those on "high blood pressure meds, pills for high cholesterol, antidepressants, or anything else." Let alone sending them to Ranger, Seal, AST, or other specialized courses.
What is the cost in military readiness to adding further "sensitivity training" to the schedule? We already know that the amount of mandatory training of this type is damaging readiness in a terrible way. What more needful training are you willing for the military to forgo?
Mental health - Trans folk have terrible mental health outcomes. The suicide rate is abnormally high. So are depression and other co-morbities with gender dysphoria. Whose mental health care gets reduced so that trans people in the military get the mental health care they need? What suicide level for military members are you comfortable with?
Again, how does enlisting/commissioning transgenders improve military readiness and effectiveness?
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RE: Trump's transgender military ban 'not worked out yet' - 
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