5/9/25

FIRST, THEY CAME FOR
THE ‘DUDES IN DRESSES,’
THEN ...
 The Supreme Court clears the way for bigotry, starting with transgender soldiers

EMILY SHILLING Credit: US Navy

THE NATION’S HIGHEST COURT, among its many obligations, is supposed to protect individuals and groups that are often small and unpopular.
     But the U.S. Supreme Court on May 6 did the opposite: the justices said that President Trump could go ahead with his ugly, unfair, bigoted attack against transsexual soldiers.
     Specifically, the high court halted a lower court’s order that had stopped Trump and his underlings from wrecking the careers and lives of military men and women who have changed genders.
     Earlier that day, the buffoon, Pete Hegseth, who is Trump’s secretary of defense, outlined the mission of the world’s most powerful military force this way.
     “We are leaving wokeness and weakness behind” Hegseth boasted at a special operations forces conference in Florida.
     “No more pronouns,” Hegseth crowed. “No more climate change obsession. No more emergency vaccine mandates. No more dudes in dresses, we’re done with that shit.”
     The quotes are from the official Department of Defense transcript, which made sure it spelled out “shit” and noted that the audience applauded and cheered Hegseth.
     Maybe a lot of us are out of patience with this transsexual nonsense.
     Maybe we believe Democrats lost last year’s election because they were lured into political sideshows that turn off most voters, who worry about the Big Picture issues like inflation, the border and turning the Oval Office into a gold-leaf throne room.
     But prejudice is not trivial.
     Trump won the election because he has a weird charisma that I don’t understand; and because Joe Biden looked, sounded and acted his age; and because Kamala Harris didn’t have enough time to make her case; and, not incidentally, because she is the wrong sex and the wrong color.
     So, we can try say that transsexuals – athletes, soldiers and other trans folks – who are an annoying minority that’s too small and too out-of-step with mainstream America to matter.
      But bigotry is America’s – and humankind’s – original sin. We fought a terrible war because we rationalized that Black slaves, economically  useful were subhuman. Later, we hoped the civil rights movement of 1960s had finished the human rights job the nation abandoned after the Civil War. And in the 21st Century, we hoped anew that the Black Lives Matters movement would, this time, actually finish the work.
     But bigotry hadn't gone away and never does.
     Prejudice is one of the reasons that Donald Trump is now bigot-in-chief, elected on a platform of hatred that started with immigrants and transsexual students and soldiers but ultimately will find new and larger targets.

THE SUPREME COURT’S ORDER on Trump’s transsexual ban got what seems to me too little media attention when the story broke, and I haven’t seen any news stories following up in the several days since.
     Part of the reason, as with any Trump outrage, is that there are too many Trump outrages to cover adequately.
      And it could be the nature of the courts, which often seems to delay final word about what they are up to.  In this case, the Supreme Court said the Trump administration could proceed to discriminate against military transsexuals while the legal issues are thrashed out at the lower-level Court of Appeals.
     But it seems to me that the justices left plenty of time for even the incompetent Hegseth to get rid of every one of the 4,200 transsexuals that the Department of Defense knows about, a group that makes up less than 1 percent of the nation’s more than 2-million soldiers.
* * *
UPDATE: The Guardian reported May 9 that the Department of Defense began the process of forcing transgender soldiers to “voluntarily” leave military service, estimating that 1,000 would be expelled initially.  The Pentagon said it would scour health records of transgender soldiers who do not “self-identify.”
* * *

IT’S WORTH MENTIONING something about the people involved in the total of three court cases challenging the Trump policy.
     Take the seven plaintiffs in the federal District Court suit in the state of Washington, which happens to be the case that the high court acted on and in which a judge declared a nationwide halt to the attack on trans soldiers.
     “Throughout their 115 years of collective military service,” wrote Judge Benjamin H. Settle in his March 27 order, “they have been awarded over 70 medals for their honorable service and distinctive performance – in many instances after coming out as transgender.”
      Judge Settle singled out Commander Emily “Hawking” Shilling, whom he said had transitioned during the period when former President Joe Biden allowed transgender people to serve. A Navy pilot, Shilling had flown 60 combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, earning three medals during a 19-year career.
     Judge Settle wrote:
     “There is no claim and no evidence that she is now, or ever was, a detriment to her unit’s cohesion, or to the military’s lethality or readiness, or that she is mentally or physically unable to continue her service. There is no claim and no evidence that Shilling herself is dishonest or selfish, or that she lacks humility or integrity.”
      Those mentions of unit cohesion and potential character flaws were not random literary flourishes – they are among the reasons that Trump and his goons claimed that transsexuals threaten military functioning.
       The Trump smear on transgender soldiers is that they are liars – men pretending to be women and vice versa; that their medical care wastes taxpayer money; that fellow soldiers can’t work alongside them.
     Not true, the judge wrote of  Shilling, saying that “Yet, absent an injunction, she will be promptly discharged solely because she is transgender.”

SO WHAT?
     The point is not that Commander Shilling is a war hero; it's that her performance, not her transsexual self, should determine her military career.
     According to Judge Settle, worries about character flaws, unit cohesion that were bigoted excuses that had been disproved during the real-life four-year experiment which Biden allowed transsexuals to serve.
     Shilling and her comrades in the Washington court case had proved themselves, and it does matter that the these people be allowed to succeed on their merits.
     Equallys important is that banning transsexuals in the military is a first step in the resurgence of prejudice as national policy.
     Biogtry, as we've said,  often starts small, with one unpopular group, then extends to the next, until it metastisizes into apartheid, a Jim Crow system of legalized discrimination, always with the potential to become outright genocide in a new Holocaust.
     It's a cliché, that prejudice is a “slippery slope.”
     Starts small, and grows.
     But does the fact that we’ve heard this all before make it irrelevant?
     That we have been warned of the danger  over and over, is the danger  any less true?
     Which is why It's worth repeating, once again, the progression outlined by Martin Niemoller, the pastor, who had witnessed what had happened in Nazi Germany:

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     First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist.

     Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist.

     Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew.

     Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.

     Mocking “dudes in dresses” is a slur, not a military special operation.
     Human “rights” are not optional.
    When we marginalize anyone’s rights – as the Supreme Court has done in the short run and seems likely to do overall in the cases of transgender soldiers  – we put everyone's future in peril, our own and our country's.