Military Clarifies Transgender Policy

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The policy is not anywhere near as draconian, and is far more reasonable, than activists at the Palm Center and elsewhere would have you believe.

Issued Sept. 4, 2020

DOD Instruction 1300.28 – Military Service by Transgender Persons and Persons with Gender Dysphoria Policy

a. Service in the Military Services is open to all persons who can meet the high standards for military service and readiness without special accommodations.

b. All Service members and applicants for accession to the Military Services must be treated with dignity and respect. No person, solely on the basis of his or her gender identity, will be:
(1) Denied accession into the Military Services;
(2) Involuntarily separated or discharged from the Military Services;
(3) Denied reenlistment or continuation of service in the Military Services; or
(4) Subjected to adverse action or mistreatment.

c. Service members who accessed in their preferred gender or received a diagnosis of gender dysphoria from, or had such diagnosis confirmed by, a military medical provider before April 12, 2019, are allowed to continue serving in the military pursuant to the policies and procedures in Section 4 of this issuance.

d. Except where a provision of policy has granted an exception, transgender Service members or applicants for accession to the Military Services must be subject to the same standards as all other persons.
(1) When a standard, requirement, or policy depends on whether the individual is a male or a female (e.g., medical fitness for duty, physical fitness and body fat standards; berthing, bathroom, and shower facilities; and uniform and grooming standards), all persons will be subject to the standard, requirement, or policy associated with their biological sex.
(2) Transgender persons may seek waivers or exceptions to these or any other standards, requirements, or policies on the same terms as any other person; additional policy guidance on such waivers or exceptions is in Paragraph 5.1. of this issuance.

e. Accession and retention standards for gender dysphoria and the treatment of gender dysphoria, including stability periods and surgical procedures, will be aligned with analogous conditions and treatments.

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The GOP’s Turn

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They Serve the Party (or, More Precisely, the Party’s Far Left Flank)

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No longer even a pretense of nonpartisanship, given that Sen. Collins is even a leading sponsor of the HRC’s beloved, and dreadful, Equality Act, which would roll back federal protections under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act that Bill Clinton signed into law.

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Consenting Adults or Hierarchical Power Differential?

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updated 8/12/20

Robby Soave looks at the controversy over Alex Morse, the 31-year-old mayor of Holyoke, Mass., who is in hot water for sexual intimacy with men as young as 18. Legally, all involved seem to be adults, and no one was anyone’s supervisor or professor, but as long as there’s a power differential these relationships are problematic.

In a Democratic primary race, Morse is running for Congress against incumbent Rep. Richard Neal, chair of the powerful Ways and Means Committee.


More. The Intercept reports that:

With the allegations short of details or any student claiming to be a victim, the focus has shifted to the origin of the letter. The man serving as chief strategist for the UMass Amherst College Democrats, Timothy Ennis, recently completed a class with Neal, who teaches a journalism course. Ennis, according to two members of the College Democrats chapter, was open about his hopes of working for Neal in the future.

Clare Sheedy, a rising sophomore and a Morse supporter, was active in the College Democrats chapter and knew Ennis through their joint work on behalf of the Pete Buttigieg campaign for president….“He spoke very highly of Mr. Neal,” Sheedy said. “What he said to me was he wanted Neal to be his ‘in’ to politics and work his way up from there.” …

Ennis was president of the UMass College Democrats from April 2019 until April 2020, at which point he transitioned to chief strategist. That same month, Morse said, College Democrats requested a donation from his campaign. He declined, saying that his war chest wasn’t large enough. A number of other Massachusetts politicians, including Neal, did make such donations. The president of the state chapter of the College Democrats later took to Twitter to applaud Neal for donating $1,000 to the Amherst chapter.

And this:

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Awoke America

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The Left, which now includes LGBTQ activists allied with BLM and the Democratic Party’s assurgent progressive wing, has embarked on a path to upturn all that is old and corrupt. This usually doesn’t end well. The American republic, built on a foundation of representative democracy and competing powers, fueled by freedom of speech treated as a sacred right, is less than 250 years old—a baby, still—and the fact that we assume it could not be toppled and replaced by a very different order is extremely naive.

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‘Illiberal’ Liberals Embrace the Woke Left

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Bari Weiss writes, in her resignation letter to the New York Times:

My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.

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Historical Matters

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As Pride Month draws to a close, the re-mything of Stonewall is ubiquitious. Some are trying to replace a false narrative with something more akin to the truth. As much as Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera are part of the story, rewriting their roles in an exercise of historical revisionism robs those who first rose up to fight back of their rightful place in history. But there are no statues, street names, children’s books or Google search page doodles for Marty Robinson and Morty Manford.

Historian Eric Marcus, writing in 1999:

The story of what really happened at Stonewall has yet to be distorted and embellished beyond the point of recognition, but it’s well on its way. The myth gets a boost every time someone writes about how “heroic drag queens started a riot at the Stonewall Inn, which marked the beginning of the gay rights movement.”

Now, of course, the gay-male drag queens have been transformed into transwomen. Gay guys, apparently, played only a secondary role in their own liberation, or so the narrative tells us.


Added, and recommended:


Hemingway adds:

If Johnson and Rivera are to have a statue, contextualizing it in relation to Stonewall is clearly wrong, and the rush to turn the pair into trans rights icons seems to be doing the exact opposite of what the New York Times suggested – it’s erasing a pivotal event for gay men by making the dominant narrative transgenderism.

Much has been said lately about the problems of wantonly tearing down statues to erase history, but the ideology behind erecting statues to invented historical narratives might be even more alarming.


Also:

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Intersectional Pride 2020

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This is now the future of “Pride”:

More, from the archives:

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